Look, is it any different claiming enough authority to say that life is generally good, than saying life entails too much suffering to justify bringing a life into the world?

Why do you object to me doing that? — Bitter Crank

There is a difference between being worth continuing and being worth ending. You can have a life not worth continuing while not having a life worth ending. Of course, having a life worth ending means you have a life not worth continuing. But sometimes there's just not enough pain to make suicide a viable option - but there's enough to make life a burden. It's mediocre. It's just something to get through.

Alternatively you could make a life worth living by other means, like rebelling or finding meaning in your life. This goes beyond what Schopenhauer thought and into the existentialists. But most of the existentialists were focused on the life already given and weren't focused on the potential lives. If we have to find a way to deal with life then it should be an alarm that perhaps this isn't something we ought to continue.

Suicide ideation in this case does not mean that people are actually thinking of putting the knife to their wrist and taking a warm bath, but rather the abstract notion that you have power over your very existence. — schopenhauer1

Interesting perspective, I basically agree. It's interesting because it reminds me of Nietzsche. Dignity, meaning, self-hood, POWER, REBELLION, these things transcend the experiences of pleasure and pain. If we aren't looking for survival resources or distracted by a certain novelty we're spending our time nursing our self-esteem or managing our CONTROL (power) over ourselves, our environment, and perhaps even other people.

Letting someone else kill you would be allowing them power over yourself, an unacceptable notion that stains the ego.

Antinatalism, at least as it has appeared in on-line discussion forums, seems more like an adolescent game than a serious philosophical position (though some people are serious about it). To me it begs the sarcastic question of "why don't you commit suicide if being born was that bad?" I don't think antinatalism leads to suicidal ideation, unless one were otherwise heading in that direction. — Bitter Crank

Certainly there are different ways one can arrive at antinatalism. Hating life is but one reason.

I personally don't hate life. Nor do I love life like those sappy Christian youth ministers proclaim. I find it to be mostly mediocre, just a blip on the cosmic history. And I believe that although I've lived a relatively stable life, this is by no means a given. A lot of these pessimists were able to write about the poor quality of life simply because they managed or were lucky enough to live a relatively stable lifestyle and understood this lifestyle was contingent and never a given.

Basically a "posh" pessimist as you seem to imagine them being is keenly aware of not only their own posh lifestyle but also the contingency of it.

I think that even though these pessimists were and are not largely living horrible lives of tremendous suffering, they nevertheless are aware of the contingency of the stable life. They can write about the aesthetics of the human conditions, which end up being negative.

Dorothy Day's optimism was at least in part inherently tied to her belief in Catholicism. A religious belief allows a person to attach themselves to something greater than themselves, and distract them from their day-to-day lives. It's an idealism.

Like most political activists, left and right, she felt the need for society to change. If you're a leftist, then you want "progress", and if you're a rightie, you want society to "go back to its roots". For the leftists, the progress ideology is a longing for a society that is Platonic-ally perfect, and for the righties the past and the traditional are given a reverent nostalgia. Both are idealistic. Leftists predict a bright, happy, hopeful, productive future (one that is always just one step away that we never are quite able to reach), and righties ignore the fact the we progressed out of their reverent traditions largely because we found them unnecessary or harmful.

For any political idealist, though, the current situation is not good enough.

The pessimists are quite similar in that they would agree that the current situation is not good enough. It's just that they don't think it can be made substantially or structurally any better, and perhaps may even get worse. They don't personally need to be going through a hellish existence to argue this. Sometimes it's just enough to have something happen to you to break the spell of optimism. Something that makes you realize that optimism is a comfy illusion and not an accurate representation of reality. It's this disillusionment and the subsequent attempts to live in a still-illusioned society that much of pessimism gains its angst from.

The existence of these pleasures however, in my opinion, to a far less vocal and obsessive antinatalism than one practiced by those elsewhere on the internet. Even if being born is risky and unnecessary, the subsequent life is usually not horrendously awful. It is mostly mediocre, with genuine highs and lows but characterized by an almost ever-present feeling of dissatisfaction in varying degrees. We can be reasonably reassured that most people will be able to cope with this willing.

Schop if I understand him correctly thought that most lives were not worth living. Like I said before, not worth living for is not equivalent to worth dying for. But Schop also thought that geniuses could rise above this mediocrity (coincidentally and probably conveniently he thought he was one of these geniuses).

No doubt. Hope in future pleasures is another attachment. But does this translate that thus future people need to exist to be attached to the hope of future pleasures? — schopenhauer1

Not if it comes at the price of great suffering, or the potential thereof. Too often are pleasures remedial instead of independently worthwhile.

Then you are simply making normative pessimist distinction of the difference between a life worth starting and a life worth continuing and there is nothing wrong with that — schopenhauer1

I certainly don't think there is anything wrong with it. That's why I suggested it to see if you have any thoughts.

The Will and such proposed by Schop is not painful in the sense a headache or a stab wound are. It's not something to be dreaded or hated per se. It certainly is not something to be avoided by suicide. But neither is it something good in itself.

Benatar wrote about this very thing extensively. I believe it had to do with the fact that once alive, one is attached to his own interest in continuing to exist, and thus the threshold is higher. These interests in continuing to live do not exist for any particular person in the life worth starting scenario and thus do not need to be in consideration. However, attachment to life (fear of death being one of them), does not de facto make life better to have been started in the first place. — schopenhauer1

Cioran also talked about this. But this makes it out to be that the only interests to continue to live are excuses and not actually reasons. This is absurd. We can have genuine reasons to continue to live, not just excuses like a fear of death or an attachment to friends and family.

I can't speak for anyone else of course, but I suspect that if you took away my fear of death or family attachments, I'd still have some reasons to continue to exist, at least right now. I'm not clutching to life like some desperate animal, motivated by fear. The reason I fear death is not just because it's unknown and possibly painful but also because it results in the loss of genuine pleasures. These pleasures I think tend to get overlooked as unimportant by the severely depressed, but the reality is that although the greatest of pleasures will never outweigh the greatest of pains, they are still extremely pleasurable.

Do your parents know you're an antinatalist and a poignant pessimist?

Just thinking about this a little more, perhaps we can have a more moderate stance of antinatalism based upon structural flaws in life without pro-mortalism. Essentially this would mean that life is not worth starting, and neither is it inherently worth continuing, but additionally neither is it worth the effort to end (in most cases at least). Like it's not good enough to start, but neither is it bad enough to end.

To sum up what I am arguing for: it cannot be that a life not worth starting is a life worth continuing, since continuation requires a beginning. Perhaps we could appeal to some existentialism, like Camus, and say that we would rebel against this system and live regardless. But rebellion does not work against pain. When I get a headache, I don't just suck it up and "rebel" against the headache. I take an aspirin. When life is quite a burden, nobody would "rebel" against it - they'd end it. The rebellion is focused on nihilism and a lack of meaning, not on compensating for great pain.

Because what I sense this is all about is an overabundance of suffering. We wouldn't not have kids because they will be exposed to a meaningless universe that somehow threatens their own dignity - they can rebel and relish in their rebellion. We wouldn't have children because they might feel extreme pain and live a life not worth living. The sheer potential for great pain is enough to argue against birth. But if we go further and claim that all lives are of great pain, then there's really no reason to live anymore except by a fear of death or a need to spread the word.

I am not a relativist, but I also don't think that everyone has to agree with the position for it to be true either. — schopenhauer1

True. But the classic pessimists were arguing that all lives are structurally problematic. They were claiming an verifiable aspect of a person's life - such as the constant "willing" of Schopenhauer - was a severely problematic thing. Now it's one thing to say everyone wills, and a totally different thing to say that because of this will, life as a whole is bad. Seems to me that the only person who can say whether or not their life is bad is the person themselves. This makes the classical pessimists seem almost authoritarian in their philosophies - they apparently know more about someone else's value of life than the person themselves. And if this person disagrees in this evaluation, well, they're just wrong. Certainly these philosophers were not just suggesting an evaluation of life, either. They were asserting (via argument) that life is bad.

It doesn't make any sense for the optimistic mafia (as you called them before) to tell you that your life is great. That's up to you to decide. So it equally does not make any sense for someone to tell you that your life is bad. If you happen to agree with them, then cool you agree with them. But that's based upon your evaluation of life, not on some logical proposition that can only be denied if someone is incapable of understanding logic.

First, I don't buy that not everyone AT SOME POINT does not feel ennui or angst. They may say they don't, but that's a different thing. — schopenhauer1

Do you think they feel ennui or angst regarding the same things that you do?

One can endure life, but not want others to endure life. — schopenhauer1

If I'm eating a stale piece of pizza, and don't want anyone else to eat this stale piece of pizza, then why am I eating this stale piece of pizza? Why am I subjecting myself to something that is ultimately not necessary and is rather gross too?

I know for a while, the big bad classic pessimists have been the gazelle you have been wanting to take down and replace with a more suitable utilitarian theory, but I just don't think it really does the trick. — schopenhauer1

Absolutely not. I think the classic pessimists have a lot to say about the human condition, and in fact I suspect they are correct on a lot of it. I think it was Cioran who said that suicide ought to be a legitimate option, and I've taken this to heart. I live my life with a keen understanding of the contingency of pleasure and an acceptance of the option of suicide.

What I don't know about these pessimists (including Cioran) is whether or not they actually did view suicide as a legitimate option for themselves. Were they suicidal? Were they just barely living? I suspect not. I suspect they derived a certain amount of pleasure from life. Because if they were not suicidal, then their pessimism just turns into a romanticized cynicism or social criticism. A stub in the toe does not make life not worth starting nor worth ending, and the pessimists weren't focused on these little pains. They were focused on bigger, more overarching pains, pains that logically lead to a desire to end them.

It is not handed down on tablets from Moses and everyone just gets it. — schopenhauer1

But the point of a philosophical position isn't just to gain a following. It's supposed to claim itself to be correct. You can be humble and aware that you might be wrong, but those who reject your position cannot be right if you believe yourself to be right. They must be wrong. I assume you aren't a relativist.

So I'm not claiming that because people disagree with x, x is wrong. What I am claiming is that a certain kind of x is wrong just because people disagree with it because x claims something about those who disagree with it. If it claims to cover humanity as a whole, and yet fails to account for other variables (disagreement), then it's flawed. This does not apply to every position.

Well, some people will just say the same about pleasure and pain, unless it's physical. Then it will be about how people look back on the pleasure and pain. — schopenhauer1

Pleasure and pain are felt by everyone. We can easily see how giving someone pleasure is good and giving them pain is bad. But aesthetic experiences are ultimately grounded in pleasure and pain - I enjoy looking at a piece of art, and I do not enjoy watching a lion tear out an antelope's throat on a nature show. But I can't necessarily say this about everyone. Not everyone feels ennui or angst about the human condition, it seems. And if this ennui or angst is enough BY ITSELF to make life not worth being born into, then it's enough to make someone suicidal. And if it's not enough to make someone regret being born, then being born is not problematic (if this is the only argument used).

What if aesthetics is subjective? Unlike pleasure or pain, how the world affects a person aesthetically seems to be subjective.

In the end, aren't aesthetic judgements based in pleasure or pain?

Can aesthetics be a justification for ethical action (or lack thereof in this case)? If aesthetics aren't bad in the pain/pleasure dichotomy sense, how can it be bad in the ethical sense?

Taking out the fear of death and pain, then for some, I imagine there is little holding them back. Otherwise, I think I sufficiently answered your question. Life is not utter agony and that isusually not the position. Rather, for the pessimist, it is a sufficient burden to not perpetuate to others, and endure while one is alive. — schopenhauer1

This is what I wanted to discuss. Sounds to me that this "sufficient burden" implies a certain level of mediocrity. Not enough to kill oneself over, but not worthy enough to begin a new life. It still implies a measure of risk, though. The worst case scenario trumps the best case scenario, even if the best case scenario is worth living for (which is my position if you want to know).

Additionally, if life is merely mediocre (and doesn't have risks for really bad experiences), then there's no reason to be abhorrent towards birth. It's just something that happens, nobody has been harmed, because life is merely mediocre. But if life is bad, then birth is problematic, but this also leads us into suicidal tendencies.

The trouble is that I don't really think the classic pessimists thought life was merely mediocre - they thought it was bad. Like, really bad. And I don't understand how someone can think life is really bad and yet not be the least bit suicidal.

I don't get this question really. — schopenhauer1

It's okay, don't worry about it for now, we'll discuss this part later.

Again, I don't want to get into another antinatalism argument. At this point, you can probably dig through all my previous posts and find perfectly good answers that I would use for these questions. — schopenhauer1

But in this case, arguing for antinatalism by appeal to structural issues of life is inherently connected to suicide. If you don't want to participate, nobody is forcing you to. But that's the topic of this thread.

You are caught up in the idea that if not all people are pessimists, then pessimists must be wrong by the mere fact that others are not pessimist. — schopenhauer1

I'm not though, considering I'm a pessimist myself. I'm just interested in what the classic pessimists like Schopenhauer thought about suicide and how they managed to have such a bleak view of existence and yet apparently not wish to die themselves.

Most people live in the world of the small. Everyday is just a day at work, a day to go home, a day to do this or that. There are negative moments, there are positive moments, but there is very little evaluation of it on a larger scale. If they start doing this, they may start seeing patterns, noticing certain things. The pessimist conclusion comes from seeing these patterns and understanding it in a certain way. Once they see this, their world becomes more understandable. Not everyone will see these patterns. — schopenhauer1

I get it, I notice these patterns as well. And actually I think most people do notice these patterns, too. It's why satirical comedy is so popular. But does this recognition of patterns and its subsequent disillusionment lead to antinatalism? Do these patterns threaten the "vision" of humanity so much that we can't be allowed to continue?

Anyways, it is enough to warrant no birth, but the aesthetic alone does not warrant immediate suicide. Again, we are not in utter agony. — schopenhauer1

Right, I just want to get a clearer understanding here. Does the aesthetic alone attack our sense of pride or individuality? Like Voltaire said, every man shits from his butt hole. Some just do it in more stylish clothing. This is supposed to show that no man is aesthetically "superior" and to show that the King is just like everyone else.

So in the every day, we go along like nothing is wrong, but with the aesthetic outlook we find ourselves in a kind of nihilism. But is this nihilism alone enough to warrant no-birth? If the aesthetic does not by itself harm someone, and if most people are not in misery, then how can the aesthetic by itself lead to antinatalism? There needs to be an additional argument, that of risk and the potential for a really bad life.

The aesthetic I describe.. let's shorten it to survival/boredom/flux for the sake of brevity (still not brief I know), is a sort of inescapable understanding. One can have a pleasure and successive moments of happiness, but this understanding does not change. One does not let the aesthetic takeaway your happy experiences, but one does not find the happy experiences are all there is, and indeed fits into a larger picture of how existence operates. — schopenhauer1

In other words, I take your (and basically my) position to be that pleasure is contingently dependent upon structural issues.

If these structural issues aren't enough to make life worthless to continue (because of real pleasures) then why should we be against birth (if we argue the structural issues route)? It seems like the aesthetic understanding of our world is inherently connected to disillusionment (the breaking of fantasies). But is this breaking of fantasies by itself enough to warrant no-birth or even suicide? Couldn't we just say "whatever" and pursue pleasures?

You sort of answered your own questions. Most people fear death and the end of their personal identity. It's not like ending a bad habit, this is the very self that experiences the world in the first place. This is not a light decision. As I said in the other thread, not many pessimists think life is complete and utter agony where the self must be destroyed at all costs and as soon as possible. Rather, they will continue to experience the happy moments when this occurs. However, the understanding is that our world imposes on us needs of survival and unwanted pain in a certain environmental and cultural constraints. Our individual wills impose upon ourselves the need to transform boredom into goals and pleasure. Being that we can never have true satiation, we are always in flux and never quite getting at anything in particular. It is a world to be endured. One may try to become ascetic, or simply live out the normative lifestyle but simply keeping this aesthetic in mind. — schopenhauer1

So like I said before in the other thread, life is like cake: sometimes really good, but ultimately fattening and bad for you. You can't have cake without the fat. And so it's an aesthetic issue instead of an actual experience issue like a toothache.

I think he is addressing this to pessimists (the handful on here). The argument for him is IF the premise IS that life sucks, then why don't you just kill yourself. This is kind of the knee-jerk question people ask antinatalists all the time. I gave my response above. — schopenhauer1

Sort of. I'm not arguing that you should actually kill yourself. I'm arguing that IF these are your premises (life sucks across the board), THEN you have to at least desire for the suckiness to end, i.e. suicide.

What I am not arguing for is anyone actually carrying out a suicide, as it may be impossible for fear of death and other constraints. But if we remove these constraints (excuses) for not dying, would you continue to live (because of reasons)?

So I would think from this, I could hold that life is necessarily objectively meaningless and crappy, but still be able to rationally assert that I do have a subjective reason for living (possible reasons might include preaching the gospel of suffering, enlightening the foolish, happy optimists, hastening the arrival of the end times, or maybe just being a decent person to other persons trapped in the same hell-hole as I am) — Sinderion

The point I was trying to make is that without these subjective reasons, would you kill yourself or have the desire to kill yourself? If so, then I there's no argument here.

If not, then something is keeping you from embracing non-existence. Something good. I'm hesitant in making assumptions of people, but I assume you aren't solely devoted to the reasons above and probably aren't suicidal. If you aren't suicidal, then this means that the things life has thrown at you haven't been great enough to break your spirit, and that you have other positive attachments keeping you from intentional death. Like I said before, it's difficult to say that life isn't good enough to be born into but is good enough to continue to experience, at least for yourself.

I guess the bottom line here is: were you glad you were born? How can one be glad they were born and yet also believe it was not worth starting based upon objective features of life (and not other arguments like risk)?

Value here is a measurement of accumulated experience. — Bitter Crank

What if you lose your memory? Are you no longer valuable?

A bad experience (like having a burning marshmallow stuck to one's fingers) enriches one's life despite the pain. — Bitter Crank

These little pains are something to shrug off and laugh about after with your friends.

But something like cancer is not. If you survive, you went through a tremendous amount of turmoil and doubt. If you didn't survive, well...you didn't survive. What part of cancer enriches a person's life? What good part of cancer is not just placed upon it in a post-hoc manner?

Rather, it is a sort of aesthetic outlook. Pessimism is the recognition of the instrumentality of existence. Our world imposes on us our survival needs and unwanted pain in certain environmental and cultural constraints. Our individual wills impose upon ourselves the need to transform boredom into goals and pleasures. Being that we can never have true satiation, we are always in flux and never quite getting at anything in particular. — schopenhauer1

Interesting, I hadn't really considered this perspective. It seems to lead to the view that something can be worthwhile while simultaneously dependent upon something nasty, leading to a disillusionment. Kind of like eating cake: it's really good, but it's also really bad for you.

Definitely rings true to me, and could be an answer to the thread I recently created.

tgw's quote inspired me to make a different thread.

lol True Detective was kinda the catalyst that drove me to look into pessimistic literature. Although I think sooner or later I would have stumbled upon these philosophies. Sometimes corny but overall a great show.

Realism about metaphysical questions just means that they are legitimate questions, not semantic ones. I believe that questions about time, composition, universals, persistence, etc are legitimate questions and cannot be reduced to language as deflationary theorists claim.

Welcome to the club my friend.

Nah what Wikipedia said isn't what I was talking about. I meant Karen Bennett's epistemicism - realism about metaphysical questions but skeptical of any answers to them, because they are empirically equivalent and theoretical virtues are meaningless. Thus there is no good reason to choose one position over the other.

It's edgy?

It's a tricky thing. You mentioned, justifiably, that anecdotal 'I know a..." accounts don't mean much. I have a whole bundle of personal women-who-self-sacrificed anecdotes but these will, inevitably, be chalked up as exceptions, falsifications, romanticizations.

But the flip-side of that, is how do you defend the idea that women, for the most part, deeply hate men, without resorting yourself to anecdotes?

Does it come down to whoever can rally the most anecdotes for their cause?

Where does your insight into the female soul come from? — csalisbury

(Y)

It means a philosophical theory and its competitors are empirically equivalent.

I smell an epistemicist.

Though I don't like the kind of smug dismissal that implies since something can be psychoanalyzed it's therefore illegitimate. Why can't someone own up to, and defend, their neuroses? — The Great Whatever

They can. We usually call that bigotry.

At the end of the day, a woman sees you as something that, if her life were in danger, you would be expected to lay down and die so she could live. I think that's the bottom line, the brass tacks. You can wax about equality all you want when you're safe and nothing matters, but when it comes right down to it and the masks are taken off, who takes the bullet?

There are pretty disturbing convictions lying beneath people's everyday actions. It takes a little prod to bear them out. — The Great Whatever

No, only some women think this.

And psychodynamic theory is mostly bullshit, especially when done by unprofessionals.

I think women genuinely and deeply hate men. — The Great Whatever

Wowowowowow this is one hell of a silly thing to say.

There are some women who hate men. And there are some men who hate women. And then there's most people who only hate those who are mean, men and women alike.

People are still just as racist as they ever were, btw -- and people become increasingly racist as they're forced to live in close quarters with other ethnic groups. I live in Chicago and this city has absolutely disgusting race relations, it's just a foul city. — The Great Whatever

But not you, right? You're not racist. I'm not racist. Apparently we're not part of the "people".

People are afraid to say it, don't care if it's swept under the rug, because only when women die or feel pain is it bad. But no, war first and foremost kills men. Everything first and foremost kills men. — The Great Whatever

Sounds more like a cultural thing than anything else. Men indeed are seen as more expendable than women. But this can be changed, just as the racism of the nation has also been radically changed for the better.

Heh. I doubt it. — The Great Whatever

No, really, it was good. Chocolate syrup, sprinkles, a banana, all with three scoops of vanilla ice cream. Perfect snack for a hot summer night, only tainted by the ever-present understanding of our existential conditions.

I don't know, man, I think you might be a little depressed and unable to experience pleasure independent of pain. It's inconceivable to you.

I myself am depressed. But I just ate a bowl of ice cream. That was nice. I'm going to a concert tomorrow. That'll be dope. What I'm not currently experiencing is an overwhelming amount of pressure or pain. And if I am, then I'm just kind of used to it and have accepted it as part of my deck of cards. It's really not that bad, but it's not fantastic either.

Clearly there's an asymmetry between pleasure and pain. It may be difficult to characterize, but I'm convinced that the latter is in some sense the servant of the former. In order to augment pain, having a carrot on a stick (pleasure) helps. — The Great Whatever

Of course. Pleasure is contingent upon structural imperfections. But it nevertheless is pleasure independent of the relief it often accompanies. Which is why the river allowing you a couple gasps of air is not a sufficient analogy. Pleasure motivates continual existence, pain forces it.