The fundamental behaviour of things is, by definition, fundamental. There is no further explanation. — Michael

But who gets to decide when something is fundamental? If we just said that it's a fundamental law that a computer turns on when the power button is pressed, we'd be wrong, since it clearly isn't a fundamental law in the sense you're getting at. It can be explained further, and thus better, than just stating that it's a brute fact and moving on.

The fact is that what you are claiming to be fundamental is perhaps not; or, if it is, there still remains the question of why it is fundamental in the first place. "It just is" is perhaps even more mysterious than "something else made it this way", but it tries to pretend to be anti-mysterious and obvious to escape any worrysome metaphysical issues that arise when people start thinking.

For as much crap that is thrown at theists for using god-of-the-gaps reasoning, popular scientists are disappointingly inept at answering this question and instead tend to pretend it doesn't exist, or use fortune telling reasoning to assert that the answer will be elucidated later on.

The game of Life, I'm not doing so well as of late ... :s

Natural laws are the natural extension of a Cartesian epistemologically-oriented metaphysics, one that rejects teleology in favor of mysterious, immutable forces that exist for whatever reason. One of the alternatives would be a rejection of natural laws as such, in favor of a re-instituted teleology based upon threshold dispositions and power networks.

Damn, that political compass test is ridiculously biased.

What book?

I don't know!!! — mew

Welcome to philosophy! ;)

I'm afraid I don't understand the question :s — mew

Analogy: there are different sorts of noodles. But are all noodles made of the same thing?

Similarly, there are cars and people and numbers and mountains. Are they all "unified' in the sense that they all exist in the same fundamental ontological way?

I didn't want to imply something like that. So, are there different ways of existing? Do these ways have something in common? — mew

There certainly are different ways of existing, in the sense of different sorts of arrangements and configurations and what have you. But the question remains: are all these different ways only ontically different? Are they unified ontologically?

Existence as a false predicate comes from Kant. Aristotelian hylomorphism is the theory that substance (another esoteric term unfortunately) is made up of a two-part duality, Form and Matter. Peircean semiotic theory is a system of signs meant to help explain a lot of things. OSR = ontic structural realism, a theory in the philosophy of science.

The job of government is to monopolize violence so nobody else gets to.

To ask such a question seems to presuppose that there is only one "way" or "mode" of existence. Does an Boeing 747 exist in the same way the number three exists? What's the difference between the existence of a unicorn and a mountain, or an appointment and a lawn mower?

Tentatively, I would say that a characteristic of existence would be causal relevancy. To exist means to be a value in a causal sequence. Inert, motion-less, and undetectable beings don't exist - or at least they don't exist in the same way actual existants do. They're pure possibility, a contingency waiting to be understood and apprehended by another entity. They're "dead" in the sense that they are not an active part in the operation of the world and thus their existence is entirely redundant. What difference would it make if eleven unknown, causally inert existants existed instead of ten? There would be none, and it's also hard to see why they would exist to begin with.

But to ask for an "essence" of existence; well, this opens the door to the question of how essence exists. If there is something that makes existence what it is, then there has to be something "below" existence, something more primal and formal. If existence is seen like Play-Doh, then we can ask what Play-Doh is made of. Maybe there's something "less" than existence, but more likely I think is that existence is either a false predicate, or it's an irreducible complexity (it has parts that cannot be separated - re: Aristotelian hylomorphism, Piercean semiotic theory, hell, even OSR or something goofy-looking like that).

What Being is, the ontological question, has been an ongoing issue in metaphysics since its very origin, but one that has largely been ignored in favor of "weaker" ontic questions. What exists takes precedence over the question of existence itself.

The extreme nominalist would probably have a difficult, maybe impossible, task of explaining qualitative similarity. The extreme realist (or universalist) would have to explain why it seems as if there are particulars, and explain how our language talks about particulars without there actually being any. The extreme universalist, it seems to me, has it easier, as particulars could potentially be argued to be just loose bundles of properties held together by symbiotic powers and forces. To be crude.

In the end, it's all about taking what we are commonly acquainted with - particulars and universals, and trying to eliminate one of them by reducing it to the other. When in reality it seems as though both exist in co-operation. Is one "prior" to the other? That is to say, is one more ontologically simpler than the other? I'd say they're equally simpler and co-dependent; it makes no sense to talk about particulars without properties, and no sense to talk about properties without any instatiation relation between the property and the particular. Thus we arrive at a substratum, or substance, view.

So what is the argument? In what way is the interaction between the mental and physical mysterious, that interaction between physical objects already is not? What provision can you make for one that will not carry over to the other? — The Great Whatever

Y'all need Leibnizian monads and vicarious causation, bitches.

Each step, as noise and signal start to be divided in the brain, has to feed back either positively or negatively as a "test" for the germinating concept. As an attempt at symmetry breaking, it either finds that it works and so runs to self-justifying completion, or it stalls and dies, quickly forgotten. — apokrisis

This works well with my own phenomenological analysis of how I reason. Except I would add that higher-order thinking processes seem to be based largely on counterfactuality (whereas in the OP I was mostly focused on the initial alarm that something has been stirring below immediate awareness, the vague impression that there might be something). Evaluating possibility, testing compatibility, comparing similarity, predicting eventuality. For a mind like mine with diagnosed OCD, sometimes reasoning essentially skips the initial step of evaluating all the possibilities (perhaps the most crucial step) and tumbles through a garbled prediction - what psychologists might call "black and white thinking", "fortune-telling reasoning", or "catastrophizing".

And it can be explained neurologically in terms of symmetry breaking. Answers form in the mind as we organise a field of uncertainty. The brain starts to suppress some possibilities as "noise", focus attention on other possibilities as "signal". If it is working - the symmetry does want to break itself in that direction - then rapid feedback drives both kinds of action. What counts as noise, and thus what counts as signal, become ever more strongly felt to us as we "tune into" the best inference to an explanation. — apokrisis

And this also works well with the Heideggerian analogy of a path in a forest. Although I don't really see what symmetry has got to do with anything. If anything it seems like symmetry-forming would be what answers are made of.

It's too perfect

I'm not knocking your theory, at least not here. I'm genuinely interested in - if a little uneasy with - your approach. I'm still browsing the philosophical market and probably will be for some time yet. But don't you see the joke? — csalisbury

I agree.

I had no idea you'd published. I'd be interested in checking out your book(s). — csalisbury

Nor did I, although I think he doesn't want anyone to stalk him or something.

There is, in other words, a kind of mutual propelling of the idea in which articulating the thought makes or fabulates the very thought which is there as a hazy seed to begin with. Recall also that the etymology of the word 'articulate' comes from the Latin arthron, or 'joint', referring back to the language of woodmaking, with it's cognates relating to the conjoining or uniting two pieces of wood. — StreetlightX

Yes, very much so this. It's as if you're given a proto-thought and it's up to you to either germinate the seed or let it die.

To identify with a philosopher is to identify with the way in which they parse out the field of intelligibility, the ways in which they say 'this belongs to this category, and that, to another'. This is what accounts for the fact that the understanding in question is, as you've put it, 'pre-reflexive': it is operative at the level of the 'problem', the organizing principles of intelligibility, and not at the level of 'answers'. — StreetlightX

Very interesting.

(2) If mind is not spatio-temporal, and body is spatio-temporal, then mind and body cannot interact. — quine

Curious, why not?

This premise seems to rest upon the assumption that something can only be causally relevant to something else in its ontological "space".

If the mental and the physical are indeed two completely different things that have nothing in common at all, it does seem difficult to see how they can interact.

But if the mental and the physical are different, but not entirely, then there is room for them to interact. Say the mental has the property M and the physical has the property P, but both have the property T. By having T, they are able to interact with each other in a way that is not possible to understand from within the ontological "spaces" of those of M or P.

To illustrate, then, say we have the mental: M=====T , and the physical: T=====P. M and P cannot interact directly from the M or P endpoints, but can interact through their T endpoints. Thus just as you cannot understand how a tree obtains nutrients from the ground by only looking at the leaves, we aren't able to understand how the mental and the physical interact from the perspective of the mental or the physical. A holistic picture would be required, but this is exactly what is impossible to obtain directly. Correlationism, basically.

Not saying I necessarily agree to all of this. I'm undecided on what I see to be the most reasonable mind-body interaction theory.

What do you think physicalism says about reality? — Marchesk

In my honest opinion, nothing really important or deep, at least in the holistic sense (and not the more specific sense, like social or political issues). Every time someone tries to cover all their bases and come up with a definition of "physicality" or "material" or whatever, something else pops up that contradicts this definition. Cartesian res extensa, Newtonian billiard balls, radiation, waves, and now some super-spooky quantum stuff and anti-matter and all sorts of exotic things that mess up our orderly spice rack model of the world.

We can, of course, come up with a list of what the physical is not, but this negative dialectic ends up looking suspiciously similar to just plain ol' naturalism: no ghosts, no souls, no gods, no teleology. No "spooky" shit, which of course is up for grabs as well. Some might see universals as spooky, I certainly don't. Some might be against teleology, and again, I have to disagree with them. Hell, even "souls" in the Aristotelian sense could be legit. Pretty soon this physicalism/materialism/naturalism becomes less of a methodology and more of a dogma that limits discourse.

(1) All ravens are black. — Michael

Isn't this an inductive premise, though? In the sense that it cannot be deductively proven that all ravens are black? What if there was an albino raven, or a raven spray-painted lime green?

Since it is an inductive premise, then, we shouldn't be surprised when green apples fail to give us any substantial deductive information regarding the qualities of ravens.

"The future is the only transcendental value for men without God." - Albert Camus

The "idolatry of tomorrow." in Cioran's words.

I would say that I agree with the overall sentiment that reason is a burden as much as it is a gift. And I would also agree that philosophy has a history of attempting to "solve" problems using reason, the same reason that was used to identify these problems to begin with. Wittgenstein would have thought that philosophy is meant to untangle ourselves from problems, whereas pessimists like Leopardi would have argued philosophy is the means in which these problems are brought forth into clarity.

But I think, at the same time, that there is some kind of non-hedonic satisfaction in acquiring truth, even if truth overall is a detriment to happiness. It's the thing that keeps us from wondering if we'd be doing a service to people like Leopardi by euthanizing them or something edgy like that.

"Therefore they greatly deceive themselves, who declare and preach that the perfection of man consists in knowledge of the truth, and that all his woes proceed from false opinions and ignorance, and that the human race will at last be happy, when all or most people come to know the truth, and solely on the grounds of that, arrange and govern their lives. And these things are said by not far short of all philosophers both ancient and modern. . . . I am not unaware that the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from true and perfect philosophy is that we need not philosophize. From which we infer that, in the first place, philosophy is useless, for in order to refrain from philosophizing, there is no need to be a philosopher; in the second place it is exceedingly harmful, for the ultimate conclusion is not learned except at one’s own costs, and once learned, cannot be put into effect; as it is not in the power of man to forget the truths they know, and it is easier to rid oneself of any habit before that of philosophizing. Philosophy in short, hoping and promising at the beginning to cure our ills, is in the end reduced to a longing in vain to heal itself."

-Leopardi, (OM 186–187)

If they can't be reduced, then how are they physical? — Marchesk

If I understand Lewisian supervenience correctly (of course there's many different views), it's that something is "physical" or "supervenes on the physical" just if every possible world with the same organization of physical substrates has the same supervening phenomenon. C is physical iff A and B are physical and A + B = C in all possible worlds that A and B are organized in the same manner.

Of course the biggest issue with physicalism is that there isn't any good definition of what the physical is supposed to be. Usually physicalists, or "materialism" in the vogue sense, is more of a reaction to what is seen as "spooky" dualism. They don't want to admit into their ontology "spooky" minds, so they shift in the exact opposite way and reject anything "like that". It's really more often than not a metaphysical view held for political and aesthetic reasons (a la Jamesian psychology of metaphysics), one that isn't as open-ended as naturalism (which is also less politically powerful). But since they have a hard time explaining what the physical is (and not just what it's not), "material" or "physical" become just as spooky as the apparently-spooky dualism they are against.

It's telling that we have to appeal to goods in life and not life itself in order to justify the latter, which is apparently not able to justify itself and so has to appeal to the accidental contingencies to cover this embarrassing disvalue. As we learned from Nietzsche, life continues not on reason and logic but on emotional impulse and irrationality. We can also take a Heideggerian route and ask: if Being is Good, then why is it that we have such a difficult time approaching and understanding Being? Does it seem right that the Good is almost impossible to apprehend?

I would not say that we are "pawns", as this implies we are being manipulated by an agent, and as far as I know the universe is not an agent. Thus any description of our predicament as manipulative or pawn-like is only a metaphor, a description that only makes sense from the "inside" and not from the "outside", the inside being a phenomenological account and the outside being an (ideally) impartial naturalistic account. Just as it's poetic to say the sea "swallows" a sinking boat, it's similarly poetic to say we are "slaves" to our genetic programming. It's not wrong, but neither is it entirely accurate, either. It's just one way of interpreting the same set of data, just one of many ways of painting reality.

Actually this very point was brought up in a book based upon a conference in Germany a few years ago, called Is Nature Ever Evil: Philosophy, Science, Value, which covered issues including whether or not we can actually see "Nature" as good or bad. Such topics brought up include analyses of "selfish" genes, or "nature, red in tooth and claw", or "a chaotic, indifferent cosmos" or what have you. Science is NOT as impartial as it tries to be. There will ALWAYS be value somewhere.

The best I can say right now is that, ultimately, nothing is intrinsically valuable in the sense that it contributes or plays a role in some cosmic theatrical production. Part of the human condition seems to be the realization of time-linearity as one of many constraints on our being, and the disconnect between what we can imagine and what actually is the case. The angst emerges when one sees that the universe as a whole has an unconscious direction towards maximal entropification, and that this "telos" is not in line with our own desires and expectations.

So, going back to the whole metaphor thing, I think it makes more sense to describe humans (and other sentients) as prisoners, victims, or, even better, exiles. Any sort of description like this is going to somewhat metaphorical and from the perspective of life-as-it-is-lived, and not life-as-it-is-studied. Or something like that.

I took your advice and purchased a used copy of Deinstag's Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. So far, I am impressed by his style and breadth. His analysis of the time-consciousness of humanity, and the subsequent analysis of pessimism's kernel as the rejection of social progress paralleling time-linearity was fascinating. Thanks.

Neither, I vote Fromm or Rank.

Gonna go see them in a few weeks. Small band + great music + cheap tickets = fun times.

Off the top of my head:

• Simone de Beauvoir
• Lady Elisabeth of Bohemia
• Patricia Churchland
• Hannah Arendt

Probably the reasons there hasn't been as many influential female philosophers as male are:

1.) Female education has historically been limited in comparison to male education.

2.) Females have historically been subjugated by a patriarchy in which males are given the opportunity for transcendence while females are stuck in immanence, oftentimes expected to support their husbands' transcendence.

3.) Philosophy might just be something males tend to do more of, but this doesn't mean males are somehow "better" than females. If anything it might just mean that males tend to be more neurotic and isolating than females, as well as excessively proud of these character faults. It's usually hard to admit when you're not attractive/charming/popular/influential so it's not surprising that these sorts of people rescue their self-esteem by elevating themselves on a plane of existence higher than anyone else simply because they think about things that most people don't know or care about. If this superiority complex has any legitimacy, then, it applies to everyone who does not do philosophy, not just some portion of the female population.

Heaven forbid. Hard enough to deal with 'alternative facts' in the current climate. — Wayfarer

>:O

A lot of epistemological positions are plagued by this matter - is there a fact of the matter whether or not facts are always true? What about that, is there a fact for that meta-fact? Where do we end?

It's not just correspondence theories of truth that suffer from this. Any theory that admits truth-like entities is going to have to deal with this apparent regress.

Keeping that in mind let us look at the God question. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that God has an effect on people - in the way they conduct themselves, in what they eat, in what they wear, etc. In fact no other entity has as broad and deep an effect on us humans as God. In some cases these effects may even be measurable.
Therefore, scientifically speaking God must exist by virtue of the multitudinous effects God has on us humans. — TheMadFool

I don't get it. "God" is not automatically seen as the cause of these effects on people. Rather, a belief in God is what should be (naturalistically) seen as the cause of these behaviors.

It's like saying it doesn't take a scientist to realize that astrological signs have an effect on people. In reality, it takes a scientist, or at least a scientifically-oriented reasoner, to realize astrological signs are bogus and aren't doing anything at all.

Therefore, on the basis of what I believe about Polos and his beliefs, it seems there's a contradiction in his beliefs about how he wants to be treated: For he wants both to be punished (since he wants what is good for him, and I believe it's good for him to be punished) and to avoid punishment (since he believes being punished is harmful and not good for him, and he wants to avoid what is harmful and not good). — Cabbage Farmer

Well sure, this is exactly why someone like Julio Cabrera or similar "negative" thinkers have brought up the "affirmativity" issue: most ethics are "affirmative" in that they focus on the "how" more than the "can"; i.e. "How do I live ethically (deontology)? How do I (ethically) live happily (consequentialism)? How do I live the good life (virtue ethics)?" instead of asking a more fundamental question: "Can I live ethically, can I (ethically) live happily, can I live the good life?"

Affirmative ethical theories rest upon the rough assumption that life and ethics are compatible and will not ever contradict each other. One of the best examples of this in action are forms of (American) pragmatist ethics, for example John Dewey's belief that what is ethical is what helps us survive. Apparently, survival itself is taken for granted. It's assumed that life as a whole is something to be cultivated and mass-produced. As such affirmative ethical theories are expansionist and imperialistic.

Now, Cabrera inserts into the equation what he calls the "Fundamental Ethical Articulation", or the principle that is basically wholly endorsed by all (legitimate) ethical theories (fuck you Ayn Rand): the non-harm and non-manipulation of others. As such, Cabrera finds that life itself forces the violation of the FEA. To exist is to limit, constrain, and be imperfect; yet at the same time expand, dominate, and attempt to self-perfectionize. To exist as an entity is to fundamentally come into friction with other entities, as all entities themselves are at least in part composed of their relations to other entities, for better or for worse.

If we take the golden rule or the platinum rule into account, then, it's clear that it cannot always be used perfectly. Like you mentioned, what a guilty person wants is different from what other people want/expect/deserve. There is a conflict of interests here (why should we have to compromise in an ethical schema?). But anyway, life has to go on for some reason or another and so we have to make a decision, and this decision has to be formulated based upon a second-order ethics. If we're consequentialists, like I am, we'll try to balance and compare the various goods and bads that would result in a decision; in the case of the golden/platinum rule, we would see how much violating one person's liberty would spare the violations of other people's liberties (to be crude and simplistic).

But further still, we could adopt a two-order utilitarianism, in which everyday decisions and whatnot follow general guidelines like the golden/platinum rule or what have you, and serious ethical theorizing would happen only in rarer scenarios of higher stakes. Thus the golden/platinum rule is not supposed to be universal principles but rather heuristics for everyday ethical living in a situation that is already set-up for moral disqualification.

S/he is in a nursing program bro. No one beyond the newbie undergrads in philosophy gives a shit about the mystical connection with wisdom you think is required for REAL philosophy or whatever the hell you're supposedly doing.

I'd tone it down a notch as you're the exact type of person that turns folks like Mary Ellen off in those sorts of classes. — Carbon

On the contrary, I would argue that the very nature of philosophical questions causes us to become "mystical" or "transcendent" or whatever you want to call it. They are so broad and general that they apply to practically all of existence. The questions are timeless.

I've noticed that when I study philosophy for a long time, I tend to lose this feeling and start to restrict the contents of my own psyche. It's not until I stop for a bit and break the cycle of narrowed-thinking that I'm confronted with the addicting nature of philosophical questions.

So if anything, modern (analytic?) professional philosophy has largely lost this feeling of timelessness and has instead become kinda bland and cutesy.

I ask because, although I don't know much about the philosophy of law, it appears to me that the justice system seems to have evolved from a natural emotion/concept - vengeance. And it also seems to me that the law wants to, or at least tries to, distance itself from vengeance. — TheMadFool

I recently read an essay (Ritual Epistemology) by Sarah Perry on what she labels as post-rationalism, or the view that rationality is helpful only to a certain point, and that all these liberal beliefs that pure reason and science and all that will not deliver us into a utopia or provide meaning to our lives. Rather, what provides stability and purpose is more often than not rather irrational rituals, including the justice system.

As Perry argues, the justice system is not necessarily about finding the truth but simply coming to a verdict. The rituals, such as the dimensions of the justice building, the flowy black garments of the justices, the Miranda rights, the strict rules of conduct and behavior within the courtroom, etc. all work together to conceal the irrationality of our justice system and make it seem like it's legitimately finding "the Truth" of the matter.

I would personally argue that justice is simply institutionalized vengeance. The state-sanctioned "setting things straight", the post-hoc rationalization of inevitable inequality. It's telling that we'd rather blame a murderer for her crimes than blame the universe for existing to allow murders to occur. Someone has to take the blame.

If you have to ask that question, then I suspect the philosophy bug hasn't yet bitten you. If you do not feel the pursuit of wisdom to be something akin to a need, without which you would be the poorer and utterly despairing, then the "stock" answers that can be given to your question will probably not have much effect. — Thorongil

(Y)

We can often find ourselves living in a way that might make life seem more like a burden than a blessing. Life would be a whole lot more agreeable if it wasn't mandatory. Wouldn't it be great if we could just shut off for a while at command and come back a few hours later once the annoyance has passed?

Unfortunately, we are given a chore to deal with - and oftentimes the only reward we get for our toils is a brief respite in unconsciousness before we do it again. How much conflict, strife, suffering and loss is due to an inability to cope with the responsibilities ascribed to us by our bodies? How much is caused by evil intentions, and how much is caused by sheer desperation?

It's strange to consider ourselves as being owned by our bodies; usually we see ourselves as the masters of our physical. Yet the Buddhist teachings ring true: if we truly were in control of our bodies, we would not age, we would not contract disease or infirmity, we would not feel compelled to sink below our threshold for pain. And yet our bodies do, and the best we can do is hold on tight and hope nothing too terrible happens. "Planning" is a method in which we attempt to harness external tools to safeguard our well-being against the insecurities and threats of whatever comes our way, including ourselves. One can wonder how many people run away from themselves, to save themselves.

The pessimistic tradition has a long history, filled with thinkers who focus on certain aspects of "the human predicament" - a web of inter-connected general complaints and observations that combined lead to an overall disappointing and embarrassing, if not concerning, picture of human existence and life in general. Some thinkers have attempted to construct a metaphysics from this in order to explain how all these poor evaluations "come together" and why they even exist to begin with. But although it can be helpful and tempting to coalesce everything into a singular explanatory model, this threatens to migrate the focus from the explicit and the obvious to the abstract and the irrelevant. Rival models clash and we're left questioning what isn't that important and ignoring that which is, that which has been irritatingly obscured again by the same sort of metaphysics that had been initially discarded when we originally began collecting these observations in the first place.

inequity — Robert Lockhart

Inequity is a general complaint that can be raised, but it's only part of the picture. As soon as we try to pin down the human condition to a single or group of conditions, we're left with an insufficient frame that fails to capture every aspect of existence. For say inequity was solved. Would there no longer be a human predicament?

The one thing that connects everything together is, I think, the unexplained phenomenological disconnect, an alienation, between the self and the rest of the world that results with a general sense of anxiety or dread, the hidden and repressed feeling that something is very, very wrong, and that it might not be just human-exclusive. Something is missing, something doesn't belong, something is defective. A Problem, lurking below the surface and affecting the current without properly being fully described or explained.

Not just "problems", but "A Problem". A Problem that is the source of all other problems. Sentience itself is a problem, as it is the way in which all problems and "The" Problem are noticed. Existence itself is a spiral of problems-on-top-of-problems, in which problems are fixed by installing new problems in a never-ending process of problem-updates masking as refinement and perfection; "delayed" problems, an act of procrastination, before the problem is finally shown to be what it is.

But here I am again, pursuing a metaphysics that sounds more like a story than anything else. Stories can be helpful, though.

Apologies for the lateness in reply, I have educational commitments I have to attend to.

Pessimists focused traditionally on quieting the Will, the unrest that is the metaphysical kernel at the heart of existence. What you discuss is what I call "contingent harms"- they are circumstantial harms that humans face based on their biological/psychological/social/cultural/environmental circumstances. Traditionally, pessimists are concerned with the kernel. To admonish them for not focusing on contingent harms, is a bit misleading as Pessimists rarely focused on contingent harms- it is what makes a Pessimist a Pessimist. It is like admonishing a cat for not being a dog. — schopenhauer1

I will grant that the metaphysical "kernel" as you mention is at the heart of pessimism, but I'll also argue that it's not just the "Will" (as that's Schopenhauer's thing), and neither is it exclusively these kernels.

In fact I would argue that contingent harms are necessarily part of human existence. To exist means to be harmed in some random and unpredictable manner. Schopenhauer himself used many examples of contingent harms - think back to his analysis of the pain of the prey and the pleasure of a predator. This isn't the "kernel" he speaks of, but it's nevertheless an example of a contingent harm that characterizes an unfairly and unequally-distributed experience machine we call life.

Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann — schopenhauer1

Great stuff by von Hartmann, I had forgotten his name and couldn't seem to find him. Bit of an obscure philosopher, unfortunately, who nevertheless mirrors a lot of my own thinking.

If everyone simply went off to help in whatever situation they can, that would leave little time to develop things and improve them in terms of technology, ideas, social change, etc.. There are so many ways that people create utility unintentionally. Who are you to decide which actions lead to the greatest good? The sports-watching couch potato could think of something on his spare time that immensely increases the utility of people and animals around the world, that he would never have done simply by directly providing aid/volunteer opportunities. In fact, if this guy volunteered, he would have not thought of that novel innovation that increased utility way more than direct aid. Further, the factors that lead to outcomes for greatest utility are so numerous, there is no reliable probability one can calculate to account for everything in terms of which action leads to greatest utility. Instead, direct aid would simply be following one's own notions of what's good, not bringing about the actual greatest good. This then would mean that one would simply follow one's own inclinations, neuroses, and etc. and not what is logically the best thing to do to increase utility at that particular time. — schopenhauer1

Well, again I mentioned earlier how it's not that we all have to get up and slave away doing things. There's charities that we can donate to and local events that we can participate in to help out the community and society at large.

You mention how many good things can come unintentionally. Yet I would argue that you're missing the far greater goods that come with intentional focus! For every lazy sports-watching couch potato that comes up with a marvelous new idea, how many other lazy sports-watching couch potatoes don't, and live their whole lives with their asses glued to their seats?

The fact is that, just as you said, we don't know how to perfectly maximize utility. We don't know whether or not excessive luxury or leisure will result in these marvelous new inventions that will save countless lives. So the best thing we can do, given our epistemic stance, is to do what we do know will help. Not sit around waiting for inspiration to pop into the minds of your everyday hill-billy in Alabama.

Even the starving Ethiopian, if he/she was ethical himself would hope that you would also pursue a life with some happiness that goes beyond helping him/her.. even if he/she appreciates the immediate aid you gave him right there and then.. The hypothetical starving Ethiopian hopefully has ends THEY would like to pursue.. just like you or I.. Pessimists are under no more obligation to have a tormenting life of than others merely because they see life as unrest. — schopenhauer1

True, I accept that the Ethiopian would be ethically obligated to want you to also be happy, even if she's starving. This goes back to Cabrera's analysis of pain, specifically torture and extreme suffering. He draws from Hannah Arendt and talks about how pain is isolating and controlling. Cabrera describes it as one of the ways a person becomes ethically disqualified.

For example, we cannot honestly expect a spy to keep his secrets if he's being horribly tortured by the enemy. Even if what this man does (spill the beans) is immoral and leads to countless deaths, we can't honestly blame him for his blunder. It's too extreme to act ethically under these circumstances.

Now, again before anyone else jumps on my tail on this, I personally believe we do have ethical obligations towards those who are suffering greatly (what Maw called "gratuitous suffering") within a certain threshold and some other minor qualifications. But you can disagree with this without changing anything about the OP, as the OP sets out to describe the differences between active and passive pessimism. The latter being more contemplative, removed, aesthetically-oriented and redemptive, the former being more pragmatic, radical, forceful and openly-disgusted with the world at large. For the active pessimist, then, there's really no place for any talk of "aesthetics" as a top priority or grand schema. There's really no place for "TRUTH" unless it's instrumental to our own ends. There's really no place for comfort, security, or loftiness unless it's in the service of some greater goal.

If I had to try to summarize it, then, it would be that the passive pessimist, when confronted with the reality of existence, tends to retreat from the world, while the active pessimist tends to swallow the bitterness and remain a player on the field.

So then, from a more personal view, as I tried to explain earlier, I don't see how these great fantastic amazing things like "TRUTH" or "A E S T H E T I C S" or "Transcendence" or any of that crap legitimately "fits" in the worldview of a pessimist. It's the same thing when a tragedy happens and someone says "look on the bright side!" and you just want to slap them silly for saying such a stupid thing. There is no beauty in this world, at least no beauty that doesn't come with a heavy price - and what sort of beauty is that? It's this kind of "clinginess" of passive pessimism that makes it what it is, like it accepts pessimism but doesn't "go all the way". One can wonder if someone like Schopenhauer would have pushed that big red button to end the world immediately and painlessly, or if he would have rather not done this for some abstract idealistic ethics or because he wanted to pursue his metaphysics more or whatever. I get the feeling, when reading his work (and others'), that they actually enjoy complaining about the world, in general at least, and it seems out of place and disingenuous. At least to me.

Assuming there aren't any objections, then, I would argue that unless someone is willing to embrace hypotheses like world destruction or biological sterilization or what have you, they really have no business talking about the suffering that inevitably calls for such action. It's like saying there's a fire down the street but being opposed to calling 9-11: like, then why did you even bring it up? Nobody really seemed to have gone far enough, from my ethical perspective, and it's disheartening. Nobody seemed to have the stomach to seriously consider how their pessimism might be implemented. The state of the world doesn't call for calligraphy or fine cuisine. It's out-of-place, like wearing a wedding dress in a war zone. It just doesn't fit, simple as that.

STRFKR is a great band.