Sure, he might have said it was as pointless as life. But still, he did it. And so there must have been some point to it. And thus also some point to life.

Note I'm not defending sports or climbing particularly. They are rather self-indulgent pursuits of course. The issue is instead that they show that suffering is intrinsic to having fun. — apokrisis

No, suffering is not intrinsic to having fun, otherwise it wouldn't be suffering! Pain may be but again pain is not equivalent to suffering.

People usually solve their existential crises by growing up and getting stuck into life.

I agree of course that there is plenty to criticise about the way life is supposed to be lived in the modern consumer society, lost in romanticism and hedonism.

But to have that grown-up conversation, you have to be already past needy pessimism. — apokrisis

Growing up - yes, the process of hiding one's scars and adopting a symbolic facade to appease the crowd. Truly an impressive phenomenon...

What do you know about psychology or positive psychology? Get out of your own bubble. — apokrisis

I know a lot more than you do, apparently. Reality can be insulting but that doesn't change anything.

Surprising as it might be, I'm generally a content person albeit with a bit of a melancholic edge. The prospect of suicide used to scare the shit out of me, but as Cioran said I have come to see it as a kind of salvation of some sort - if shit hits the fan, I'm okay with exiting.

What doesn't kill you will sometimes makes you wish it had.

That is why your argument is weak. You have to jump to unrepresentative extremes to make your case. — apokrisis

Not really, though. Extreme pain is indeed an extreme example but not because it's strange, unusual or anything like that. It's extreme because it's extremely intense. As Adorno said, how can we do poetry and metaphysics after Auschwitz?

And even if these extreme pains were unusual - does that change anything? Does the concept of unrelenting and useless torture not give you the chills or make you question the nature of the world?

And then of course there is the part of my argument that you keep missing, the parts about tediousness, boredom, unremarkability and suffocating emptiness.

Your whole approach is flawed in trying to reduce human existence to some calculus of joy and anguish weighed on a set of scales. A life is a construction in which happiness and pain are useful signals. We need to focus on the nature of that construction - it's good or bad - rather than on the signals. This is because the signals themselves will be interpreted quite differently, depending on the kind of life being constructed. — apokrisis

I don't get what your getting at here. In the end, we have all sorts of experiences, good and bad and neutral depending on what our preferences are. I'll admit that I am indeed a utilitarian consequentialist which not all pessimists were/are, but only because I think other positions are untenable.

I mean why is a rough sport like rugby so enjoyable. Why would anyone punish themselves climbing a mountain. How does suffering of this kind become the most fondly remembered aspects of a life? — apokrisis

Pain is not equivalent to suffering. As Levinas said, suffering is useless, and that's also why Ligotti called life "malignantly useless". The pain you experience while playing rugby is acceptable...however I'm sure you'll agree that the pain that happens when you break your arm playing is not.

But anyway rugby, like most sports and entertainment, is fun because it challenges us within a certain threshold of security. We fundamentally trick ourselves into believing that we are heroes for overcoming the opposition in a purely fictional setting.

Zapffe was a prolific mountaineer, who climbed mountains because he thought it was the most pointless thing to do. A real irony, but then again, the aesthetic may be the only redeeming feature of a pessimistic worldview.

Now you will just repeat your mantra that I am talking about exactly the self-delusion which you - in all your superiority - have the better sense to see through. — apokrisis

I'm not saying I'm superior. But once an illusion/concealment has been shown to be what it is, it's difficult to submerge yourself again. That's how you solve an existential crisis in the usual way, isn't it? Surround yourself with your comforts and securities and distract yourself for long enough that you eventually forget what was bothering you. Until something inevitably triggers the questioning again, usually in the form of something tragic.

You are here because countless other organisms have suffered uselessly. You are the product of their combined subjugation by the whims of the environment; a billion-year-old gladiatorial arena. None of this is worthy of praise - it is utterly useless, pointless and morally repugnant. But to come to this conclusion requires one to look past your favorite ice cream shop or the next order on Amazon.

You have a flawed thesis. You think the point of life is not to feel the slightest discomfort, rather than to actually live it and make something of it. — apokrisis

I didn't say that was the point of life. In fact I'd argue the point of life, pace Nietzsche, is to make art and express oneself by the aesthetic.

All the science stands against you there - from biology through neuroscience, sociology and psychology.

Your case hinges on a mentality you have chosen to construct - one where you have got into the negative habit of focusing on the very worst possible outcomes and treating them as the sole determinants of your existence.

It's learned helplessness dressed up as "philosophy". — apokrisis

No...it's not. Get out of your bubble and read some psychology, and none of that positive psychology bullshit. Go read Becker, go read Freud (the parts that don't involve penises), go read Zapffe, go read Heidegger, go read Adler, go read Rank, go read Fromm, go read Schopenhauer, Cioran, Ligotti, Brassier, Feltham, Darwin. They've said it better than I can, and a lot of it is free online.

Again, my point is that you start from the histrionic and personal position that suffering, in any degree, is an unbearable fact. But most people just don't think that do they? Life has it ups and downs but that doesn't make life not worth living. — apokrisis

I'm not just arguing that life has its ups and downs, I'm arguing that life has far more downs than ups (and that the down are structurally apparent), and that the reason most people don't find life unbearable is because they have found methods of dealing with the pain, just as Zapffe, Freud, Becker, Nietzsche, and others have argued. All of this leads to the idea that life is something to be endured - which a lot of the survivors of Auschwitz did but that doesn't mean it was good that they went through Auschwitz. Now of course Auschwitz is an extreme example, but in fact it's a poignant one as well since it shows the extreme polarity and unbalance of pain and pleasure as well as the systematic exploitation (instrumentalizing) of the structural pain within life itself.

Affirmative existential thinking can potentially justify the continuing of a life in a purely irrational, emotional and aesthetic way (pace Nietzshce) but that does not make starting a life totally fine. Indeed the reason we have to act this way is out of desperation.

So you have structural pain manifesting as tediousness, boredom, unremarkability, daily uncomfortable experiences, and a general sense of unease on the day-to-day while also having the prospect of extreme, utterly horrible pain, pain that can only be described as torturous, pain that would make us question continuing existing at that moment and which, pace Cabrera, removes us from our ability to act ethically (as in these situations we are solely concerned with ourselves and thus may neglect others). This is not an exaggeration, it is an absolutely real prospect. What if your entire life led up to you dying in horrible pain?\ Would all the good experiences in the past have any effect on you in that circumstance? No. The pain you experienced would be so intense that you would question the very decision to bring you into existence.

Ignoring this prospect is a classic example of Pollyannism and magical thinking.

This is silly. Things with a telos in this fashion can't get worn out unless they are used to achieve things. So you could say living and dying without properly living is certainly a waste of a life. Thus the end point of a drill's existence or a person's existence would have to be judged in terms of the negentropy created as well as the entropy spent. — apokrisis

Heidegger does indeed call achievement the essence of action. Doesn't change the fact that action is inherently predisposed to inevitable destruction, not to mention that many actions are quite terrible.

Your position relies on constant exaggeration. Mostly we have all those things to deal with the realities of life. To claim they are "exactly" fictions to hide death is more argument by histrionics. — apokrisis

Unlike what you claim here, I actually have scientific data to support my views. I'm not just going to ignore an entire sector of inquiry because you personally don't like it.

I agree that there can sometimes be something sexy about pessimism or existentialism in general, but ultimately I think if you are more often than not preoccupied with being suave and fresh with your pessimism then you're doing it wrong. Scotsmen aside, a real pessimist does not enjoy being a pessimist. I conceive of a pessimist as someone who is systematically reducing their life-affirming biases in pursuit of the truth in a risky and fragile existence.

In regards to the compatibility between instrumentality and objectivity, I don't know. I suppose this is one of the reasons I tend to be suspicious of pessimistic metaphysics, which seem more like narratives than insight into the reality of the world (as most metaphysics for that matter tend to be - elaborate fairy tales that trick us into believing that we know something).

I accept that. But that also makes pessimism less interesting here in being less a metaphysical issue and more a practical one - unless it is actually then related to the philosophy of biology. — apokrisis

It's more phenomenological and existential than philosophy of science, concerning the qualitative experiences of a sentient organism, or a mind. A conglomerate of phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind and perhaps some others.

The claim that consciousness is a curse is not really a philosophy of biology claim. It's definitely more poetic although this does not necessarily take away its force, and it's fundamentally sourced from a reflection on the human condition than a reflection on a specific biological feature. Although I'm sure you could get to the same conclusion regardless of what method you take, so if you're a reliabilist about the scientific method I can see you coming to the same conclusions, albeit in a longer and annoyingly tedious way. Things need not be perfectly crisp or mathematically quantifiable to be meaningful, useful, and more importantly right.

So in a sense pessimism is indeed existentialism, but it's a different kind of existentialism that makes it unique in that it does not affirm life or existence whereas the famous existentialists like Camus or Sartre did.

Whereas some pessimistic thinkers like Schopenhauer made pressing observations about an isolated phenomenon (consciousness) and tried to explain the rest of the world based on it, we need not limit ourselves this way to make pessimistic claims. But generally pessimistic claims are going to center around the objects of ethical value - sentients - and the constraints imposed on them.

Just as your pragmatism has a rich history, pessimism has a rich, albeit neglected, history, extending as far back as the Sumerians and their Epic of Gilgamesh, or with Plato's condemnation of the immanent, or the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Gnostics, or Shakespearean theater, or the comparatively radical nature of Buddhism and its focus on ending suffering. The modern pessimist rides on these ideas while attempting to find global similarities between them all and staying within the realm of the intelligible.

Not having a grandiose or systematic metaphysics does not usually affect pessimistic works, since pessimistic metaphysics is usually in response to the immanent objectivity of phenomenological studies. Whether or not Schopenhauer's metaphysics holds water does nothing to his evaluation of the human condition, although certainly metaphysics can be used as a rejoinder as discussed below.

But my position is not that life is bliss. Things being less than positive is not uncommon. We all know that. However what is histrionic is to then call it all a tragedy. — apokrisis

I never said it had to be bliss in this case, although I might question why we ought to settle for less (the mediocre). The point is that I think generally life is far worse than mediocre and we're not willing to face this immediately accessible fact. As Ligotti said, life is malignantly useless.

But that is hardly true. We spend a long time growing before we start decaying. So again your position - to the degree it has to depend on these kinds of histrionic claims - is unconvincing. — apokrisis

It is in fact true, because at the ontological level Dasein is a being-towards-death. Heideggerian ontology implicitly places focus on possibilities more than the actualities, since Being is a process; there is never a complete thing. Actuals are quite simply an ever-tumbling series of possibilities falling over each other.

Our "telos", or end-point (not the functional point) is death. A tool's function may be to drill holes or hammer nails, but ultimately its final destination is with it breaking and being tossed out. The final destination of a star is a supernova or a white dwarf. The final destination of a human is death, regardless of all the existentially-heroic feats a human does in their life, just how a terrorist may go through many growth spurts before ultimately blowing himself up - in the end, we always knew what was coming, we were just kicking the can down the road. Claiming we grow and flourish during life does not change this fact, and claiming that death is not psychologically problematic is laughably absurd - on the contrary, death is exactly why we have culture, religion, political parties and the family unit as well as a host of other reassuring fictions, such as entertainment or pop-science.

But it was bad metaphysics that did the deceiving - the idea that individual lives must have cosmic or divine significance.

And it is still bad metaphysics to jump to the other extreme of complaining of existence as a complete state of generalised contingency, brute fact, and cosmic insignificance.

Modern understanding confirms life and mind as special in being - in the cosmological sense - very highly developed in terms of complexity, or negentropic organisation. We are at the centre of creation in that way.

And a proper analysis of the human condition ought to respect that objective truth. Which is why the almost instinctive reply to the Pessimist is start paying more attention to the biological and social context that is actually psychologically forming you.

Stop thinking simply, start thinking in terms of reality's complexity if you want to talk accurately about what is true or right. — apokrisis

Pessimism is generally less concerned with the lack of meaning than existentialism is. It's more of the combination of the lack of meaning + the inevitable and structurally inherent pain in life that makes life problematic. The abstract notion of the lack of meaning is actually relatively unimportant here, as we can see pessimistic ideas in the thinkers of the ancient world, during the time of luck, chance, and gods and before any serious nihilism was pursued.

You might personally find interest in Ray Brassier, who argues that scientific inquiry, instead of liberating us in the Enlightenment sense, reveals to us complete and utter nihilism. We are a species doomed to extinction. He is committed to a naturalistic metaphysics and draws heavily upon modern science to support his claims as well as the phenomenology of Heidegger and others.

Furthermore, Zapffe focuses more on the lack of cosmic justice than meaning. Accidents happen all the time for no reason. The struggle for space and resources due to a cosmic scarcity cause strife and conflict. To live is to be deprived. The universe is unable to support our dreams, and our novelty interests are merely distractions - objectively speaking there is nothing in the universe worthy of praise, as if the universe is a Spinozistic pantheistic god and whose priests are the pop-science dolts on the front page of Time magazine, proclaiming the wonder of life and universe while systematically ignoring the fundamental instrumentality of being and subsequent suffering this inflicts upon conscious beings. Life continues to continue to continue to continue to continue for absolutely no rational reason whatsoever. Hedonism is merely a distraction. An empty universe is not a tragedy. etc.

The overall point I was getting at is that Stoicism and your enlightened pragmatism and the like all are philosophies that affirm life without what I see to be a good enough justification. Your particular version focuses on the broadest holistic sense we get from physics while ignoring very real psychological phenomena, from Pollyanna-ism to the neurotic episodes to our disturbing desires and repressed memories and fears. The fact that we are having an argument about this is, I think, a point in favor of pessimism: what if you're actually right and I never agree with you and live my life in a less-than-positive state - wouldn't that be a tragedy? Is it my fault that I'm wrong? Let's not forget the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world: you and I and everyone else are manifestations of Being itself. The existence of pessimistic thinkers like Schopenhauer are not something to be ostracized as if they are less-than-natural manifestations of the world: instead, the world is capable of producing such miserable ideas. The world is capable of producing great suffering. And the world is oftentimes incapable of producing equally great experiences. From your perspective, these thinkers might be akin to a tumor on an organism that must be removed before it metastasizes - and yet this also means you are ignoring the ontological fact that an organism can be so flawed as to produce a tumor and instead focusing only on removing it.

Is it that your claim is the crisp possibility (like your fear of torture) can't be in anyway unthought or defused once experienced? I'm dubious of that as a psychological fact. I see it as the development of a psychological habit, and habits can be forgotten or at least be unlearned in ways which eventually render them vaguer. — apokrisis

As soon as a person is born, they are in a state of decay, or being-towards-death. When we live, we are in a state of defense even if we don't realize it. Defending against threats. And ultimately forgetting that we lose in the end.

Happiness, pleasure, and the like are thus distractions, or concealments, of our basic ontological structure. This structure is incompatible with our psyche due to an over-evolved brain. Thus our entire lives are basically one episode of neuroticism after another, which can be seen from Becker.

I'm not wrong about any of this. Maybe there's other aspects I'm forgetting about, or I'm exaggerating the importance of these claims. But they are nevertheless real aspects of reality that are inherently problematic. And I think that once these are seen, it is difficult to un-see without self-delusion.

Yes, I think there is an element of heroism, as there is in practically any action we take. The number one priority of the ego is to affirm itself as an important piece in the world, as a symbol that stands out from the rest of them. Like Kierkegaard said, we quite literally constrain the world to fit our own little neighborhood, i.e. limit the contents of consciousness a la Zapffe. It's human nature just as it is human nature to breathe oxygen. Therefore a key aspect of pessimistic literature is the disillusionment with the world, the idea that there is nothing here for us, that we have been deceived this whole time.

Instead of "vague" I would use the term "uncertain". It's uncertain whether or not the world has meaning, or if there is any sense of justice, or if we'll get horrible hurt tomorrow. This was, as I interpret it, a key point in Zapffe's (and in fact Kierkegaard's) philosophy - the mind is a hive of possibilities and we don't have an easy way of dissolving these possibilities. Particularly with the possibility of extreme, torturous pain - how does one live, not just survive, but live when experiencing horrible physical pain?

Possibilities rear their ugly head when they are seen as threats. When the Stoic sage tells us to ignore these possibilities and carry on with life serenely, they implicitly accept the fact that they are first and foremost threats. Ignoring these threats may give us some relief, but this is inherently an act of concealment. From a purely scientific point of view, this may be no more interesting than the fact that humans depend on oxygen to live, or that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. But from an aesthetic, ethical, and existential perspective, the nature of this phenomenon threatens the very dignity of a human, the assumption-illusions underneath affirmative ethics that make it seem more like a religion than anything else.

The idea of hope is deconstructed as well - what does it say about man if what keeps him going is a twisted sense of fear projected into vanity? We must be a sad specimen indeed if this is what keeps our spirits up, the illusions that the grass is greener on the other side. If we're honest with ourselves, we won't bias our perceptions with ideas that might be fictions, i.e. self-deception. Once again, we have a threat to our dignity, our self of autonomy, uniqueness, value and importance, concepts that are not able to be destroyed without repercussions.

In any sense, I think the idea that there is no rational ground for hope has more support than the idea that there is. The fact that we depend on self-imposed delusions is, I think, evidence of the lack of any substantial justice or importance. As Zapffe said, any constructed meaning is a pseudo-solution to the metaphysical lack of it.

To say that pessimists should suck it up is then, from the perspective of a pessimist, akin to telling a domestic abuse victim to love their spouse.

So, all worldviews are distractions in this sense, and the desire for "objectivity" you mention is often a neurotic desire to be correct, so as not to appear the 'fool' who is 'deluded'. How much this psychological dynamic seems to drive philosophical discussion on forums never ceases to amaze me. I think it is all a distraction from what really matters. What really matters is that you come to see what will change your life and take you away from holding worldviews; this is the meaning of life and there is no formula: it is different for each one. — John

I see you've read Nietzsche. Interesting points.

Existential angst seems to require some degree of objectivity and a desire for objectivity. Delusions can be comfortable but we inherently don't like to see them as delusions. We want objectivity. Tricking ourselves is not acceptable, even if it is comfortable.

Namely, James Ross's argument for the immateriality of the mind. — Marty

I've been meaning to make a post on Ross's argument. I'm not sure if it is as persuasive as others make it out to be.

For sure it's gendered, but that's the point: to avoid instances where women's voices are overwhelmed by men who think they know what's best for them. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You see the same thing from women, though. It's apparently wrong for men to tell women what is best for them, but it's totally okay for women to tell other women what is best for them. As if there is a strict metaphysical divide between men and women, and personal liberty is thrown out.

A woman prostituting herself is shamed by many feminists, and used as an example of the Patriarchy's influence. But is the woman actually being oppressed here, or is that just an aesthetic of the feminist ideology? What if the woman doesn't mind prostituting herself, or actually, god-forbid, enjoy it? Should other people be able to tell her what it best for her, or tell her that she doesn't know what is best for her because of something-something the influence of the Patriarchy?

They need one another to sustain their interdependent conspiracy theories. — Hoo

This.

Radfems and co. often berate the Men's Rights movement, and the Men's Rights movement often berates the Radfems and co. It's an endless series of fear-mongering and strawmen.

We've all been offended at one time or another because of something that someone has said or because of someones expressed belief which we find objectionable. Conversely, we've all found something that someone has said praiseworthy, or some belief that someone has expressed to be admirable. The simple explanation, which also happens to be the one that I find the most plausible, is that this is because some beliefs are wrong, and ought to be eschewed and condemned, and others are right, and ought to be accepted and promoted. — Sapientia

The only reason I can see for this, though, is because we fear the ramifications of a poor belief or desire the functionality of a good belief. Beliefs, in my opinion, are simply latent actions, or actions that have been repressed because of more dominating actions. They are desires and judgments that inherently have a motivational component to them - unrestrained, all beliefs lead to action.

Indeed if you're going to have a belief and yet not do anything, I would question your honesty or your will. Beliefs without actions are useless. What is scary about bad beliefs is that we can imagine what will happen if these beliefs are put into practice.

Resuscitating this thread. What is the place of existential angst in nature? Where does it come from?

As far as I can tell, humans are the only known organisms that have the capacity to reflect upon their existence to such a degree as to confront at least the possibility of meaninglessness, nihilism, the absurd, annihilation, etc.

This notion of possibility fits well with what Zapffe wrote in his essay:

"But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic."

The medieval Scholastics also thought that modality was a critical aspect of the Intellect, and actually many of them went on to argue that our Imagination is what leads us away from the truth (which would be, in their eyes, their metaphysical structure and religion, somewhat begging the question - a great way to convert people, though).

Then we have Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, etc who all were transcendental in their phenomenology, in that the realm of the possible created the conditions for actuality (in a top-down fashion). Especially in regards to Heidegger with his idea of "being-in-the-world": a person is not "apart" or "away" from the world, a person is inherently a "part" of the world, or a "manifestation" of the world itself. The human mind becomes no more special than a falling leaf, or a photon, or a nuclear warhead; furthermore, the failings of a human being become not just personal failures but cosmic failures as well (i.e. a catastrophe in Zapffe's terminology).

Put all these thoughts together and we get a basic idea of what could be a defining characteristic of a mind, that it is a hive for possibility-modelling. Even if these possibilities are in fact false in the naive correspondence realist theory of truth, they still hold sway for the self model that is emergent from the mind itself.

Indeed this is an important aspect of theories of cognition and rationality: the ability to think counterfactually by conceptually piecing together if-then propositions in an endless series of combinations, discarding the ones that are "problematic" and maintaining and/or rearranging those which are "useful" or "sensible".

How all this works, from the computational aspect to the semantic aspect to the metaphysical substrate aspect, is still a mystery. Perhaps finding the answer to these will give us a better understanding of what the mind's place in reality is; i.e. how the world is able to model itself, or how the world is able to create a functional, yet transparent system (i.e. "cosmic amnesia"), or how the world is able to host what Zapffe called "cosmic panic" (i.e. "cosmic insecurity").

I don't have an excellent background in feminist philosophy, nor the history of feminism, but this apparent third-wave feminism strikes me as a rather hateful movement whose proponents are getting angry over things that never happened to them decades ago, i.e. taking the abuse of others in the past as a personal attack.

Additionally, it's striking imo how these radfems are so vocal about the woman's right to choose or the woman's liberty and yet oftentimes act quite paternalistic themselves. Ideas such as "all sex is rape" is justified by appeals to the Patriarchy, as well as claims that women "don't know what's best for them" - as if a woman can't think for herself despite the apparent influence of the Patriarchy. Is it still oppressive if the woman enjoys it? If so, then this becomes an aesthetic argument and not an ethical one.

Just to clarify on this point – an important thing to note here is that hunger is not a notification in the sense of providing the organism with information. The organism learns nothing about the objective state of their body from being hungry per se (that is, not unless they are prior aware of some theory of objective hunger and take this sensation merely as an indicator of some separate state), nor what needs to be done to recognize this. — The Great Whatever

This is precisely what I was referring to. Thanks to a familial relationships and pseudo-memories imbued within genes (i.e "instincts"), hunger automatically, or very quickly is learned to be, a signal for the need to consume something. A baby, when faced with the crisis of hunger for the first time, cries out in anxiety, and is then fed goopy food or breast milk. Soon the baby learns that there is a direct relationship between them experiencing hunger, crying, and getting food (a something that tastes interesting and goes in the mouth), therefore, the experience of hunger is connected to getting food. As the baby matures into a child and adult it takes responsibility for this necessity and gets food on its own without (usually) crying.

How am I even supposed to respond to this? — The Great Whatever

To interject here, sometimes people eat because they enjoy eating, or because they're bored. You are correct in that we seem to eat primarily to get rid of an uncomfortable notification; indeed without this uncomfortable notification the only thing that would compel us to eat would be an understanding of biological functions paired with a general desire to continue to exist. Generally I would say that most people would prefer to rather continue to live without having to eat instead of being constrained by the biological necessity of fuel and the subsequent motivational discomfort.

Perhaps this is why Aristotle was quite reserved and pessimistic in his thoughts on the telos-attaining man. As I recall, Aristotle thought contentment and "happiness" was only available for those who didn't have to work hard, manual labor for their entire lives and had a certain degree of comfort and luxury. These comfortable people inevitably started doing philosophy, and reflected upon the human condition and thus we have existentialism/pessimism.

There have of course been attempts at what you would call a positive ethics, notably Utilitarianism, but they inevitably find themselves caught in the barbed wire of the realisation that it is rarely possible to promote pleasure or happiness to the primary aim at no cost in terms of harm to others. — Barry Etheridge

So this is exactly what I was talking about: the prioritization of harm. You haven't really done anything to explain why harm is more important than benefit, though, other than say that harm is an emergency, which begs the question as to why harm is an emergency.

To answer to OP, then, I would argue that a unitary existence, if it is at all coherent, would at the very least need to be:

• Self-sufficient (such as a being of pure actuality in Aristotelian metaphysics)
• As simple as is metaphysically possible (which I think is the biggie here: can a simple being have parts, and if it has no parts, how can it do anything?)
• Transcendent
• Metaphysically omnipotent (as everything derives its existence from the One, or is a part of the One)

Oddly enough these match up rather well with traditional conceptions of God, minus the omnibenevolence that is somehow benevolent outside of our petty little human moral schemes, and perhaps omniscience, as would apply to a dormant God, or a intellectually-inert being such as the Will or the Hindu Brahma.

But I think asking what a unitary existence is like might be a category error. Experience might not even be compatible with unitary existence.

Ernest Becker brought to light in his book The Life and Death of Meaning the psychoanalytic observations of young children. In youth, children develop three separate identities: Me, Mine, and I. Me is the social identity, and the first on the scene. Then comes the property identity, then the third personal ownership identity. The overall point made was that humans inherently have a deep reliance on other people for validation, and this explains why family units can be so strong, or why cultural or national identities are so rigid. These social spheres literally become a part of the ego, and in fact were the first aspect of the ego.

My questioning was meant to understand how everything can be said to be a unity. If everything is everything, then this seems to be saying the same as everything is nothing as there is no room for individuation. — schopenhauer1

If I recall correctly it is that the Neo-Platonists believed that complexity cannot be explained by complexity (only simplicity can). Whether this leads to monism is another story but I think it certainly can be used to support a monism.

I brought the idea that there has to be an ever-present organism in his conception as time could not exist before the first organism perceived it, and yet time started with the first organism. — schopenhauer1

By and far Kantian correlationism. Yup.

However, since the Will persists as atemporal, there could not be a time before time, and thus makes this a conundrum, as time- being the "flip-side" of Will also could not start at any prior time before time. — schopenhauer1

I don't see how persistence makes any sense outside of any relationship to time. Maybe the Will is a transcendental space-time worm or something, where it exists at all places and at all times. But if it's outside of time and space, then action cannot occur, and intelligibility doesn't seem to be able to exist, let alone be seen as a metaphysical specificity.

I'm surprised, to be honest, that Schopenhauer's monism is what worries you about his metaphysics. In my opinion, that is minor challenge to his view; if necessary, we could always postulate the existence of some sort of dualism, or a cosmic metaphysical principle (the Will) that would govern the actions of the two (Being and Nothing, for example, or the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu).

The problem with going about this route (in order to maintain the Will component), is the main problem that I see with Schopenhauer's metaphysics: he's trying to explain a rather isolated and unique aspect of the world by reifying the human condition into a cosmic condition. Schopenhauer explicitly argues that we are able to come to know the Will via introspection; his metaphysics is simultaneously pessimistically absurd and yet anthropomorphic.

In reality there is likely a naturalistic explanation for why we are the way we are, without need to appeal to an anthropomorphic "something" outside space and time or poetic hypotheses of cosmic exile, and Darwin already helped dispose of the latter (under a naturalistic framework, of course). I've personally tried to explain this by my own naturalistic metaphysical idea, that of scarcity and fatigue, in which the psychological phenomenon of willing would fit snugly. Humans are a curious yet tragic accident, not so dissimilar to a random bug you find in software, where the strange and un-normal persist only because of conditional circumstances. The naturalistic view looks at the context in which a phenomenon happens and try to understand it holistically, whereas the romantic view looks at an isolated phenomenon and attempts to explain everything else by this one phenomenon.

Schopenhauer's Will becomes not so different from the traditional conception of God, albeit without any explicit benevolence. It's a higher-power force; while theists see God as purely rational and omniscient, Schopenhauer saw the Will as purely irrational and blind; while theists see God as ultimately caring, Schopenhauer saw the Will as ultimately uncaring. They are two sides of the extreme and both involve appeals to a unitary, transcendental force behind reality.

In Schopenhauer's conception, the world is a unitary force (aka Will) that manifests as individuated objects in the phenomenal world of space and time. According to him, we are always striving because there is always a deprivation or lack of something — schopenhauer1

According to Quine, the answer to the fundamental question of ontology, "what exists?", is this: "everything." Everything exists.

Maybe you can explain this to me, but if the world is one (as Schopenhauer argued for, a monism), how can something be lacking? Where are these "other pieces" coming from? Are they just being rearranged endlessly as the Will changes form or whatever?

This would seem to lead to the idea that the end-goal, or "telos" if you will, of the Will (if there is one) is that of perpetual motionlessness, or changelessness. Nothing is altered, the pieces all fit together and the puzzle is complete. In more scientific terms, this means the inevitable evaporation of usable energy, i.e. the entropic heat death of the universe.

I'm actually taking a digital circuit logic course right now, so this is kind of up my alley a bit. Hopefully philosophizing about all this won't affect my grades X-)

Nothing is 'equal to' or 'identical to itself', 'in-itself'. These notions are heuristics that are imposed upon nature for the sake of communicative ease. — StreetlightX

I'm not so sure about this. Certainly there can be analog and digital measurements, but ultimately what exists at the present is what I believe apokrisis calls "crispness" - the vague becomes the discrete, or the digital. Digital corresponds to certainty, analog to uncertainty or vagueness.

The properties that leech on their objects would be identical to themselves. To be 4.15678 g just is to be 4.15678 g. The fact that the object we are weighing measures at 4.15678 g means it has a discrete amount of mass associated with it. There is a fundamental reason why an object is a certain way - say, 4.15678 g. It's not arbitrary; there are discrete properties of objects.

Furthermore, analog systems inherently have digital parts anyway, they just aren't computational. Additionally, the way I understand it, analog systems are not so much a separate kind of thing than they are a less discrete digitalization. Instead of binary 0's and 1's, you have a much larger range of outputs - but just like in an analog clock, these outputs are restricted. An analog clock can only represent certain intervals. The more we narrow down our constraints, the less able we are to maneuver: there are many different kinds of stars, but there are only two biological and fertile sexes. There are a gazillion species of animals, but there are only three naturally occurring isotopes of carbon.

Isn't the difference between an analog and a digital system a digitalization anyway? Either/or you are analog or digital...

Is a heuristic identical-to-itself?

The implicit understanding of Buddhism is that the Buddha 'sees things as they truly are', meaning, generally, that he understands the psychological and affective causes of suffering, which arise from craving and identification with sense pleasures. — Wayfarer

He understood the cause of stress, which although is indeed suffering, does not cover all bases. Buddhism can help with anxiety, stress, disappointment, fear, etc. But it hardly helps with any other kind of discomfort.

Then you'll have people who are there basically by accident and along for the ride, who will never feel comfortable there, and that all things considered the society itself would be more comfortable without. It's the former people's problem, not the latter's, how the society is supposed to continue, because the latter have no stake in it and can't be expected to cultivate something that is hostile or alien to them, or that they have no interest in maintaining. — The Great Whatever

Unless we're misanthropes, we would get involved in social affairs (for ethical reasons) if we cared about the people who were part of society. We need not care about the culture for us to care about the people subjugated within the culture.

From my perspective, it's that we're a part of society whether we like it or not. Nobody asked us if we wanted to be born, nobody asked us if we wanted to be a part of the world, and yet here we are. Furthermore, we also have a certain amount of compassion mixed with rationality that leads to a compelling sense of obligation towards others.

So when someone says it's "not their problem", this, to me, comes across as ignoring what other people are feeling. Not caring. At what point does someone else's problem become your problem?

I'm not sure what society needs, and I haven't given it too much thought because I don't think it's my problem — The Great Whatever

Do you accept that this is the bystander effect?

I don't know. Thinking that the point is to be happy doesn't mean expecting or demanding to always be happy. It's just the attitude that suffering is toll one pays. Also, why seek for a sense of security? I'd call this an aspect of happiness, feeling safe. So even the desire to believe that life is about the pursuit of happiness looks itself like the pursuit of happiness. I'd even conjecture that we tend to tolerate painful "truths" only as tools for the restoration of peace. Homoestasis, return to the creative play. That seems to be the game. — Hoo

The point I was getting at is that the human psyche's stability during episodes of trauma is primarily held together by hope. Hope for a better future, hope for a happy future. People will delude themselves their entire lives, believing that if they just run a mile a day, or go Paleo, or convert to such-and-such religion, or meditate three times a day, or get organized with their ergonomic crap, that then they will finally be happy. It's never quite accomplished, though.

If I understand this correctly, it's that Deleuze is concerned with the "canonization" of philosophers, and the subsequent assimilation of thought. Thus thought is constrained by the thought-idols of the past.

If this is true, I have to agree. In fact this kind of reasoning has been running through my mind a lot recently; although I get a lot of influence and inspiration from the philosophers of the past, I also feel the need to distinguish myself and have my own philosophy. I don't want to just be a philosopher-fanboy, an acolyte of one single person's ideas. Aristotle didn't have the Truth, nor did Aquinas, nor Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. They all had interpretative answers to an identified problem.

Thus I try to take a more hermeneutic approach, synthesizing the thought of many thinkers before into my own thought. I think the best method of doing this is by identifying the questions/problems that each thinker struggled with: for even if their answers are insufficient or incorrect, they at least identified an issue that must be dealt with. The answers change, the questions remain (unless you're Wittgenstein). If you limit yourself to the answers (the "story") without identifying the question structure, you essentially end up with an extremely narrow and blind view of reality, believing in an interpretation without understanding what the interpretation is of.

I guess you could call me a scavenger of some sorts. Systems inevitably get updated or replaced - philosophical systems are no different from the OS on your laptop. I like to take a look back at the previous versions, see how the current versions build upon them, and mod the hell out of my rig for my own preferences while adding my own personal touch.

Most of our actions are related to overcoming a certain amount of deprivation. Not all deprivation is bad, however, only the deprivation that makes us a slave to our desires. Which, coincidentally, happens to be quite a lot, but there do exist deprivational actions that are "worth it" - these are usually the actions that we have fun doing or feel a sense of moral duty to accomplish. These are the actions that don't feel like a chore to do, the actions that we straight up enjoy partaking in, the actions that we are glad we are doing and which constitute a flourishing mentality.

Speaking of accomplishment, that is exactly what Heidegger thought was the essence of action. To do is to accomplish (by means of tool-usage).

Coming from a psychological perspective, most people at most times of their lives are not critically aware of how fear and death constitute an integral part of action. Anxiety, a form of fear, is what motivates us to do many of our actions - if you do not eat, you will die, if you do not drink, you will die, if you do not get a job, you will die, if you do not pray to God, you will go the Hell, etc.

So I think people like to believe that happiness is the purpose of life. But I think this is a pipe dream that nevertheless hoodwinks people into a false sense of security.

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity." - George Bernard Shaw

Maybe it's not the philosopher's ideal/perfect knowledge, but it's knowledge that we do in fact act on. — Hoo

Indeed Plato thought that our necessary prior knowledge was not justified true belief but merely true belief - pragmatic belief.

As a consequentialist, I have generally two options to pick within consequentialist ethics - act and rule consequentialism. These are further refined by sub-options. In my case, I am a partial rule consequentialism, or "rule breaking" consequentialism. Rules are put into place as a heuristic for decision making. Those actions that typically result in the best-possible outcome (maximizing happiness, minimizing suffering) on the global scale are made into rules, however, being rules, they are also made to be broken. When a situation presents itself that would make following the rules result in a less-than-optimal outcome, then the rules ought to be broken. They were more akin to suggestions than anything more.

This means that, for example, murdering a person may be an acceptable form of action, such as in self-defense, or in a political assassination. In my view, to see the act itself as immoral (and not the consequences) is to forget why the act was originally seen to be immoral (because of a history of repetitive consequences) and to misplace the focus of ethics, which should be on sentient welfare.

Partial rule consequentialism also tends to reject notions of intention, consent, and instrumentalization as "special" rules of some sort, since doing so would once again forget the bigger picture, the consequences at stake. Instrumentalization, in particular, is what I think to be a disguised way of holding that suffering holds priority over pleasure. So although I reject notions of utility monsters, I can and will still hold that negative utility monsters are perfectly acceptable, which results with the conclusion that the instrumentalization of someone who is not as bad off as the person that this act is meant to help is acceptable, assuming there aren't better options available.

We are conscious but do not have a robust sense of self. It is only with the sudden experience of something extremely unexpected and strange that a phenomenal self model is thrust into the picture, and we lucid dream.

When we dream we typically have a duller sense of pleasure and pain. In fact there are cases in which fully-conscious people experience extreme pain but do not find it to be a bad thing.

I tend to find what little I read of analytic metaphysics more or less incomprehensible to me. I don't say this as a value judgement on my part, I just literally and plainly mean that I don't understand 'what's going on' when I read alot of that work. I imagine that it's a similar feeling to what happens when the uninitiated read some of some of Heidegger or Derrida for the first time. The conceptual anchor points are missing, and the significance of the results are lost on me. — StreetlightX

Ever since the legendary epic smack-down between Quine and Carnap, in which Quine objectively won and thus rescued metaphysics by placing it on the same level of meaningful-ness as the natural sciences, realist metaphysicians have taken to rehabilitating the Aristotelian being qua being metaphysics as first philosophy.

The above story is a silly oversimplification that is actually more incorrect than correct, but it continues to be used as a justification for this kind of metaphysics. Additionally, the realists are those who are most active in metaphysics and are thus the most vocal, and yet they are also the minority, as Chalmers argues that there is a silent majority looking on skeptically as the realists have their fun.

In other words, I don't confuse my personal disappointment with insight into questions of (in)significance. — The Great Whatever

Perfect.

Yes, and in general the preoccupation with social progress and exploration for the sake of exploration.