I mostly agree, but I don't think that live's pleasures and pains

But the upsides outweigh the downsides.

can be additive, sure there are greater and lesser pleasures and pains but I don't think you can add them up and say yea this life has more pleasure and less pain. To be clear, or at least as clear as I get, I am not saying that one life can't be qualitatively better than another, only it can not be quantitatively better.

It is better to seize the day and make the most we can of it. — Bitter Crank

I would like to agree, but it makes philosophy redundant. If there is no wisdom to seek, then there is no need to contemplate life’s sorrows, or their amelioration. Not that there’s anything the matter with saying it, and it’s admirable in its own way - but it’s not what gave rise to philosophy in the first place. To put it another way, if philosophy is nothing more than ‘hey ain’t life grand’, then what is philosophy?

(Although hasten to add, perfectly agree with your rejection of nihilism and ant-natalism.)

Quantifying pleasure and pain is a rhetorical device. There can certainly be "more pain" and "less pain" -- I've experienced more pain and less pain. Likewise, there can be "more pleasure" and "less pleasure". Some nights in the Garden of Earthly Delights have been more pleasurable, and some nights have been less pleasurable.

So yes, we can not treat them mathematically. We can't quantify the pleasure of a terrific orgasm and say it is 37% more pleasurable than a run-of-the-mill orgasm, or that a fantastic orgasm arithmetically balances out the pain of a dental cleaning by the hygienist from hell. If we could, I'd bet that the hygienist from hell would beat the best orgasm all hollow. (I ran into that hygienist 3 years ago and haven't forgotten the experience.)

I don't think my statement rules out philosophizing. Should not the philosopher also seize the day? Our philosopher doesn't know how long he has to record his insights, so, shouldn't he get on with it?

BTW, I didn't say life was grand, I said it was good. Don't you think life is good?

I don't think that life is good in itself. Life would be empty and horrible if we didn't actively try to make it good, or seek out good. I am a bit of a nihilist myself; i dont see the point in life as it is. Life has the possibility to be good, life is possibility. But in itself it is nothing unless something is made of it. Depression reverts one back to such state of nothingness, whether it is severe depression or not. Part of what makes life difficult is that it is endless possibility trapped in confinement; we dream freely but are frequently unable to fulfill such dreams- and when we cant reach those dreams, it feels empty.
I strongly think that the upsides do not outweigh the downsides..the downsides are usually the things that affect peoples lives the most; whether it be a trauma, a loss, anxiety, depression etc. People usually remember the bad instead of the good since it affects them more. I may be interpreting you wrong, but are you taking a bit of a hedonistic stance?

There may not be a purpose for us to fulfill, there may be no unifying pattern which makes all life meaningful. We are lucky to be dynamically alive. However happy or sorrowful each of us may be, we will not be here long before we are gone forever. It is better to seize the day and make the most we can of it. — Bitter Crank

If there is pain and suffering, liars, thieves and knaves that prey on the kind, loving an innocent then there will always be purpose; find a way of ending that whether it is within you, within your family or your social circle, even politically. Small or big, we can always improve.

I stopped experiencing sorrow when I stopped playing the victim and began fighting the good fight. I stopped feeling sad and lonely the moment I made the decision that I will not expect anyone to love me but I will work hard to love others. I stopped feeling scared the moment I starting seeing the results of my work with young people, the moment I saw my girls get stronger and happier and my boys become focused and respectful. All the misery in the world can be resolved by the simple act of listening, you don't even have to have the answers, everyone will find it when they are ready.

This does not make me someone special. It does not make me too "kind" or a prude. I am cool, I wear awesome clothes and shoes, have laughs and watch Adam Sandler movies, I pump it at the gym and have killer discussions with friends, but I have girl balls, basically. Being virtuous is not by following an image; it is simply being courageous.

I am not sure if I agree with part of your thread title (antinatalism). Not that I think that giving birth itself is immoral, but giving birth for the wrong reasons are. As one who does not have a family, parenting is not something that just is but there needs to be a mutual desire to procreate and to understand the underlying moral value to 'family' and that is why I personally have made the choice not to have children. Without the right man who will share the same desires make the idea of having children a very remote concept for me that I will return to my original objective and counter the emotions that come with it through adoption.

I assert that LIFE IS GOOD, but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from trying to...

actively try to make it good, or seek out good — Intrigued

I agree that life

is nothing unless something is made of it. — Intrigued

and I earnestly urge you to get on with making something of it.

I strongly think that the upsides do not outweigh the downsides..the downsides are usually the things that affect peoples lives the most; whether it be a trauma, a loss, anxiety, depression etc. People usually remember the bad instead of the good since it affects them more. — Intrigued

I am not sure if this is factually true. It may be, but a lot of memories--both good and bad--are lost. On the other hand, there is a benefit from forgetting bad stuff--especially the bad stuff that one didn't bring about by his or her own actions. People who describe themselves as depressed (I speak from experience here) tend to focus on bad stuff. Depression is an affliction, not a philosophical stance.

I may be interpreting you wrong, but are you taking a bit of a hedonistic stance? — Intrigued

I've never been accused of being a hedonist, but there is evidence that premium ice cream is better than the cheap stuff.
You are interpreting me wrong.

Don't you think life is good? — Bitter Crank

Well, it happens to be, but to be honest only a part of that is due to me. And life is also fleeting. But then, the remark above from ‘Intrigued’ saddens me. Many people feel like that nowadays. Neitszsche predicted that nihilism would become endemic, and I think he was right; actually it’s about the only thing I agree with Nietzsche about.

But there is a malaise of life, and it needs a cure, which is what ‘philosophy’ ought to provide. If you don’t need the cure, then more strength to you.

Why isn't 2500 years of philosophy effective prophylaxis against nihilism? The nihilist didn't read it, perhaps? Is there something about post-Nietzsche philosophy that is more antinihilistic than that which came before Nietzsche?

You said "life is good in itself". Not just that life is good, but that it is inherently good; "the goodness of life is present without our perfection". What i interpreted you saying is that simply living is a good thing and that we should recognize that; that we need to see how life is good in itself, as if the good is already there. What I'm saying is that we need to create the good for ourselves, not find what is already out there.

then there will always be purpose — TimeLine

I wasn't ruling out individuals finding purpose, just that it wasn't an installed feature.

parenting is not something that just is but there needs to be a mutual desire to procreate and to understand the underlying moral value to 'family' — TimeLine

I don't like antinatalism, but I also don't care for people reproducing willy nilly because they won't practice family planning techniques that are readily available, and which no-one is stopping them from using. Now, disadvantaged, powerless women in some third world countries may not have access to family planning, and may bear many children without wishing too. Their moral situations are quite different from those who could plan pregnancies and don't.

Why isn't 2500 years of philosophy effective prophylaxis against nihilism? — Bitter Crank

Modern day society is the disease that philosophy was trying to prevent. Being stuck in it propels the nihilism to me

What I'm saying is that we need to create the good for ourselves, not find what is already out there — Intrigued

Since I said life is good from the get go, I won't endorse your position that we have to somehow make it good. That life is inherently good is like grace: You don't have to do anything to achieve it. It is yours for the asking.

But... since you want to create the good for your life, then go for it. You can take the materials of your life and enhance or elevate them to a higher better good. I wish you all the success in the world.

Life is good, but society has plenty wrong with it, I'll readily agree. But most of the people in this post Nietzschean world are NOT nihilists, yet anyway. So, why are the majority of people not nihilists? Why inoculates them from succumbing to that 'poisonous' philosophy?

If 2500 years of philosophy saved billions of people from nihilism, then it was all worth it.

Why isn't 2500 years of philosophy effective prophylaxis against nihilism?
— Bitter Crank

Modern day society is the disease that philosophy was trying to prevent. — Intrigued

:-d

As much as I'm getting tired of the repetitive pessimistic rants here (despite being a pessimist myself), I cannot agree to what you are saying here (because I am a pessimist).

Life is Good in Itself. — Bitter Crank

What does this mean? What is "Life" with a capital L? What does it mean that it is Good?

Too often is "life" associated with a sunny, cheery afternoon, the greenery of the landscape, the cutesy Hobbit village. But that's not "life". That's only a way of life.

The same can be said of most conceptions of life - they are ways of living, not life itself.

The way I see things is that, after you have met all your basic needs, have worked and strove to maintain a tolerable equilibrium, and aren't horribly suffering...then you might start enjoying some things. The negative is structural, and the positive contingent. This is exactly what the Buddha meant when he said that "life is suffering". Life is suffering, even if there's some good parts to it as well.

But the upsides outweigh the downsides. There are pleasures and joys, loves and sorrows, great music, drama, art, and science, dreams, the fascinating details of life on earth, the vastness of the universe, and all such things. — Bitter Crank

Do you mean instead that the stuff that happens within life can be good? If so, then I agree - there are many things in life that are good, great even, and are worth celebrating. But LIFE itself? No, that is not good. We absolutely must make a distinction between the empirical, ontic phenomena within life (love, music, drama, art, science, dreams, etc) and the metaphysical, ontological structure of life itself (suffering, desire, decay, disease, death).

True enough, there is pain and suffering; disappointment and aggravation; hard labor and little reward, injustice and inequality, tyranny and worse. — Bitter Crank

There will be liars, thieves, knaves and scoundrels who will prey upon the kind, loving, innocent, and defenseless (as well as each other), and that has always been the case. — Bitter Crank

...and will continue to be the case. The problem with affirming life is that you implicitly affirm all of these bad things as well.

Affirming the things within life can be and often is innocent. Affirming life itself is most definitely not, since it entails the affirmation of that which should not be affirmed.

But the upsides outweigh the downsides. — Bitter Crank

Do they, though? If the upsides outweighed the downsides, why are there pessimists? It puts a dent in the proposition that life is good (TM) when there are many people who cannot seem to recognize this, and in fact when most people live as though it were not good (but rather a burden, a chore, sometimes even a nightmare).

I like you BC, you seem like a nice enough person. Don't waste your time on us pessimists, cause we're not gonna start loving life any time soon. Optimists have a hell of a lot more to lose than we do, which is why I always feel a bit of guilt when I argue my pessimistic point.

Neitszsche predicted that nihilism would become endemic — Wayfarer

Why did Nietzsche think nihilism would become endemic? He lived 1844 to 1900... what had he seen, heard, read in the 19th century that convinced him of the 20th and 21st centuries fate?

Nietzsche was a pessimist, nerds. A Dionysian pessimist, but a pessimist nonetheless.

I completely agree with you. I attempted to argue the same thing but less eloquently

I think the fact that most people want to live is a testament to life being generally good.

Do they, though? If the upsides outweighed the downsides, why are there pessimists? It puts a dent in the proposition that life is good (TM) when there are many people who cannot seem to recognize this, and in fact when most people live as though it were not good (but rather a burden, a chore, sometimes even a nightmare). — darthbarracuda

Some people feel that "life is like a sewer: What you get out of it depends on what you put into it." I don't suppose these people went far out of their way to become pessimists and or nihilists, but they probably had some hand in it.

Thinking that life is a sewer is the flip side of thinking that life is good. It's a simplified version of a complex matter. One could criticize my view as some sort of nit-witted la la land puff piece, I suppose. I would hope not. I don't deny that "good life" has problems. Life just is problematic, even if it is good. There are bad people in this good life. There are difficult diseases in good life. It isn't perfection of niceness that makes life good, it's existence-at-all that makes life good.

If Nietzsche predicted more nihilism, maybe he predicted more depression as well. There are an awful lot of people who are, or who think they are depressed. Depressed people favor gloom over glam. They see the negative more readily than they see the positive.

We absolutely must make a distinction between the empirical, ontic phenomena within life (love, music, drama, art, science, dreams, etc) and the metaphysical, ontological structure of life itself. — darthbarracuda

Why?

There may not be a purpose for us to fulfill, there may be no unifying pattern which makes all life meaningful. We are lucky to be dynamically alive. However happy or sorrowful each of us may be, we will not be here long before we are gone forever. It is better to seize the day and make the most we can of it. — Bitter Crank

I think this, and the rest of what you said, says more about how you find yourself to be attuned to the world or to "life in itself" than it does about life in itself. I don't know what "life in itself" is, but the way you are towards it is surely a positive way to be.

Nietzsche was a pessimist, y'all. A Dionysian pessimist, but a pessimist nonetheless. — darthbarracuda

Seems like it’s a glass half full half empty issue, from what I recall of him. But he did have parables that to me are not indicators of pessimism. That one about the beast of burden as camel that then has its back broken due to carrying too much of a load, then transforming into a predator, a lion, that needs to destroy the monster of thou shalt (and thou shalt not)—the size of this monster being proportional to the weight it once carried—and, after so liberating itself from this body of authoritarian constraints, then is reawoken, or rebirthed, as a baby who sees the world for the very first time. To me, it is a parable of hope; of challenges to be sure, but one that is nevertheless far more optimistic than pessimistic in its underpinning.

Saw that you posted this on another thread and found that interesting and applicable to this conversation. Quite odd, that you would say that, given what you have discussed here:

"Our existence makes us biased in assessing the significance of our existence."

As said above:

I think this, and the rest of what you said, says more about how you find yourself to be attuned to the world or to "life in itself" than it does about life in itself. — bloodninja

Philosophy may greatly enrich our understanding of the grandeur and complexity of life. I don't believe philosophy can have any soteriological function beyond the deflationary; for example, showing "the limitations of knowledge to make way for faith" or helping us realize that our existential dilemma consists in demanding answers to questions that cannot be answered in the way we think we would like them to be; in other words showing us that we are "bewitched by language". These soteriological functions are both deflationary functions of philosophy, but the joy of philosophy which consists in creating ever new concepts to see the world in different lights is not a deflationary, but rather an expansionary, function.

Why did Nietzsche think nihilism would become endemic? He lived 1844 to 1900... what had he seen, heard, read in the 19th century that convinced him of the 20th and 21st centuries fate? — Bitter Crank

That is a major assignment in a University course on philosophy or intellectual history. Here's a summary by a philosophical theologian, David Bentley Hart:

Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. His famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.

Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

For Nietzsche, therefore, the future that lies before us must be decided, and decided between only two possible paths: a final nihilism, which aspires to nothing beyond the momentary consolations of material contentment, or some great feat of creative will, inspired by a new and truly worldly mythos powerful enough to replace the old and discredited mythos of the Christian revolution (for him, of course, this meant the myth of the Übermensch).

I suppose it's all a bit fraught, for a casual conversation, but it's what comes to mind.

I don't deny that "good life" has problems. Life just is problematic, even if it is good. There are bad people in this good life. There are difficult diseases in good life. It isn't perfection of niceness that makes life good, it's existence-at-all that makes life good. — Bitter Crank

I don't know what to think about this, the claim that the sheer existence of life makes it good. I mean, I'm familiar with Scholastic attempts to show the existence just is good, since it's the actualization of a potential and this entail more perfection, but that doesn't seem like what you're going for here, and I don't like Scholastic stuff that much either.

What about life makes it good? Why is it life that is good? I've already given my reasons why I think life is not good (not that life has no good within it) - the inevitable suffering, decay, disease, and most importantly death. Life is suffering, life is death. Every cradle is a grave.

So when I hear these claims that "life is good", it always strikes me as more appropriate to say "certain forms of unsustainable ways of living are good". As has said, we have to strive towards and create the good within life, it doesn't come ready-made. And if we don't go for them, we suffer (and probably die eventually).

It's a shabby game, because even if you win, you lose. That's what I see to be the core of the pessimistic point.

Why? — Bitter Crank

Because I think making this distinction between the empirical, contingent aspects of life and the structural necessary aspects of life gives a more accurate picture of human life than the more common view that life is a "see-saw" or "mixed bag", some good, some bad. On my account, the good that happens within life takes place within the context of a broader negative landscape. In my opinion there is hardly anything more absurd than the notion that life is meant to be enjoyed. It's just what it is.

It also helps me and I think some other people to approach life in this way. As Schopenhauer said, life makes sense if we see it as a penitentiary. If we approach life as something we have to struggle against, we can help prepare ourselves against the inevitable and live a more heroic life.

And finally it frees pessimists from the charge that they can't enjoy anything in life, or can't see anything as good at all, and actually thus makes it more digestible to non-pessimists. I don't deny there can be good things in life. I just deny that life viewed outside of the present, subjective moment, can be seen as anything other than bad. And that's probably fairly easy for many people to accept, since they already oftentimes do - see how they affirm things within life in order to "make up for" the structurally negative things in life, like death and disease.

So in the end all I'm saying is, keep living your life if you want to, but don't be fooled into thinking these enjoyable aspects of life constitute life itself, or qualify life as good. And certainly do not procreate or encourage procreation, as abstaining from procreation is far easier than suicide (and the vast majority of the rest of life, at that).

I don't believe philosophy can have any soteriological function — Janus

I came into philosophy through spiritual philosophy, and that's where my interests lie.

What does this mean? I don't think you can fairly characterize Nietzsche's philosophy as "pessimistic". So, could it be that you mean that he had a pessimistic temperament? If so, that might be true; but even then, it would not follow that his philosophy must be a pessimistic one.

Life affirming pessimism perhaps?