I just don't want to, I don't think I need a reason.

I think you could convince people that loving their family was bad, tell them they're on the wrong side of history for it, that it betrays a kind of selfishness and the blindness that makes us prefer closer things, etc. You can get people to believe whatever you want if you get them young enough.

But if they did, they wouldn't have children. So they can't. *shrug*

They 'like compassion' only and exactly insofar as it aligns with whatever other cultural beliefs that have nothing to do with compassion. What animals it's okay to kill is arbitrary, etc.

Either. I think people like conquest, sex, security, admiration, victory, comfort, money, that sort of thing.

Yeah, or at least I think I've said it before. I talk openly about these things if people ask. I'm not that different temperamentally from my parents, maybe more extreme.

Let me put it another way -- I can comprehend thinking it's okay, because I used to think it was. What I can't comprehend is both being compassionate and thinking it's okay.

My hunch is that people don't really value compassion at all, but there's some benefit to signaling that you do. Really, they have other values that they place more highly, which is why they're okay with birth.

As far as birth goes: I know you've said you have a relatively good relationship with your parents They inflicted an unspeakable horror, and thus must have no actual empathy for you, yet you're concerned not to hurt them. Why's that? — csalisbury

I don't think my life in particular is an unspeakable horror (but some people's are). But it's not great, and birth is literally the source of all bad things that can possibly happen. I don't hate my parents because I think it's not their fault, they didn't know any better. I'm not big on personal responsibility generally, I don't think people have any real control over what they think, do, etc.

As to doing service to suffering, I really just mean empathy - which isn't empathy unless it attends to the particular. It doesn't much interest me what Schopenhauer says about empathy because he also conveniently theorized a way to separate theory and praxis. — csalisbury

What passes for empathy seems to me to be this aestheticized horse crap, though, which ultimately always finds convenient excuses for why the suffering ought to be perpetuated. Some days I feel that if the empathy was real, the result would just be anti-natalism. 'Oh, I empathize with you, just not in any way that will actually end your suffering, rather than make it a tool for my own values,' and so on. How could an empathetic person have a child? If you're concerned about particularity, focus on that particular act, which has to be done individually by each person. I just can't comprehend thinking that is okay. Forget the abstractions, you're making a concrete decision to actually inflict something unspeakable on something that you claim you empathize with. But then, what does your empathy amount to? As much as Mother Theresa's apparently.

So the response seems to be, 'that can't be right because it's aesthetically displeasing.' Apparently we need to 'do services' to suffering? What does that mean, exactly?

OK, so the truth doesn't make a good painting or philosophy book. But our suffering is apparently now some sort of art object that needs to be cultivated and wept about in the right tactful way.

I'm just going to add that the truth of it, and the reason why all of it seems comical when the pain hits, is that nothing helps, nothing at all. Pain can't be endured, but only eliminated. There isn't any aesthetic or poetic or metaphysical or religious transcendence of it, no meaning that shapes it into something productive, nothing. Pain is utterly superfluous and unbearable and absolutely nothing is any good in the face of it. And life's just a bunch of pain, and that's it. There's nothing else, no depth to it or anything that makes it worthwhile.

Yeah, I'm aware of those statistics. There are a lot of ways to look at suicide. I think it would be interesting to see what the correlation between philosophical pessimism/antinatalism and suicide is. "It is not worth killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." "I Can't go on, I'll go on." "suicide is a will thing too, you know" Philosophical pessimists tend to be very proud ppl, and suicide is giving in. — csalisbury

I don't share that attitude, and I don't think Im an aesthete either. Most days I feel like I want to die, but I know I really shouldn't do it.

I mean, quite simply, that women don't usually seem to devise theories of everything, while a lot of men seem to be drawn to them. Would you agree with that at least? — csalisbury

In my experience, women are under the impression that they already understand everything -- and to that extent they feel they don't need to theorize. Men feel empty and try to make sense of the world by imposing something on it. Women don't need to because their place in the cosmos is transparent to them so all problems are already solved just by virtue of their existing, and whatever place & privilege they take themselves to have is the answer. It's really hard to explain. They're always 'on the right side of history' so to speak.

(though I do think that part of a certain male virtue signaling and ingratiation toward women involves attributing superior faculties of empathy and reasoning to women in various ways -- e.g thinking men are rigid and hierarchical and platonistic and autistic while women are subtle and complex and empathetic and so on -- obviously there's a shade of that in what you just wrote, men are expected to degrade themselves and show their mature nature by 'admitting' the superiority of women and decrying how much men lack in their humanity and so on).

Men kill themselves more -- their suffering is concrete, suicide is concrete. I don't think it comes from philosophical positions like pessimism. Though if inclined to philosophy the concrete suffering will make a man more inclined to pessimism.

As for women not thinking in totalities, I don't know, that' snot something I've ever got the impression of.

Yeah, I don't deny all these things exist. I just don't have the general impression, from experience, that woman are basically contemptuous and entitled - at least not any more than men. I honestly don't. Again, it might come down to differences in our respective social milieus, who knows. I get the sense that maybe you think that deep down I agree with you, but won't - or can't - admit it for certain reasons. Is that fair to say? — csalisbury

No, it's fine, and I don't expect everyone to notice or have the same opinions about everything.

The split between men who confront existential displacement with honesty and authenticity and women who don't, who hate and cheat and feel superior - in some ways, this reminds me a bit of that experience I mentioned when I first went to college (in Boston, FWIW.) How everyone else seemed to be on this other wavelength, excluding, getting one another but rejecting everyone else, not really lonely, and how, as you pointed out and I later realized, this was mostly because I hadn't really gotten to know any of them well enough to know what they were actually like. — csalisbury

I think men hate men too, and women. I've been told women hate women, but I wouldn't know about that. Men are for the most part happy to be women's useful idiots and bullet shields, so why would anyone stop them?

And sure, I think they're all complex, completely miserable individuals. If you want to get to know them you can find out just how complex and miserable they are. That's what the pathos is all about, being pathetic.

Jokes made between women, open contempt, body language, displays of entitlement and superiority, behavior during crises like infidelity, divorce, and death, voting patterns, gender stereotypes, that sort of thing.

But, again, what led you to start frequenting these sites? — csalisbury

I don't really remember. I've always been attracted to reading about radical political views, and learning about the people that hold them. I like learning about weird people generally, and conspiracy theories and fetishes and that sort of thing.

Sure. But think of all the other unsavory causes that would make this same point. For a non-believer, there's something a little disquieting about this kind of rhetoric — csalisbury

Honestly, I think a lot of people are right about a lot of things, even when both sides are in opposition. In civic life you're supposed to pick a side and believe its rhetoric and discard the other, but to an outsider if you dig deep enough they often both start to look right. Often when two groups hate each other, both deserve the hate of the other. Just a heuristic, anyway.

Yeah, but I think most of the attitudes they espouse are implicit in the way 'non-polemical' women behave. It's a slow, gradual disillusionment. 'But it's only a radical minority!' is always the first hurdle.

I have a reading list of blogs and image boards. I've also hung out on leftist, rightist/alt-right, and nu-feminist forms. And read a bunch of radfem blogs and such. I'd like to stop, people can be pretty revolting.

I'm not sure how to respond to this because, while you are free to believe what you want, a large portion of this is clearly contrary to Schopenhauer on any plausible reading of the text, so it becomes difficult to discuss if we're talking about his views and not ours.

Yes, objects need subjects and subjects need objects- Will "needs" representation, representation "needs" Will. — schopenhauer1

This seems to imply that the will is a 'subject' and the representation an 'object.' But this is wrong, subject and object are both contained in representation, and will is neither. Yes, the subject and object are co-essential. But neither is essential to the will.

Will does not come "prior" to Representation. — schopenhauer1

It does, in the sense that there is plenty of will without representation (the latter only exists in highly developed organisms), but not vice-versa.

There is no time before time where Will is doing this or that such that time and space are created at sub time x. — schopenhauer1

Yes, but this is not because representation is somehow essential to the will or has been propping it up for eternity, but rather because the will is timeless.

Just as the Will is eternal, so too is the primitive organism, as again the first organism was NOT created at any one point in time, since there was no time before it existed. — schopenhauer1

This is just wrong, though, both commonsensically and from what Schop. says. Obviously the organism did arise at some point in time, the world of presentation attests to this, and Schop. frequently speaks this way.

Time only functions when the organism is around, but so long as it does, it always retrojects backward to a time before that organism existed. You are confusing things and talking about time as if it were part of the thing in-itself. If you want to talk about time, you can only talk about it via representation, and in representation, time presents itself as preceding the life of the organism, always. And this suffices for the empirical reality of the fact that there was a time before the organism.

You are asserting that I did not mean that it exists in a timeless present. If I did say that, then I will just agree to the language of timeless present. Again, this is the oddity that I find not convincing- the ever present organism. — schopenhauer1

A timeless presence is not the same as ever-presence, as if this means the organism is very old or has been there since the beginning. It's just that the subject, as the one that projects time, is itself not temporal.

As for your idea of "veils used to objectify Will", you make it seem like there is a second party hiding the Will. It is all Will, but it is just another aspect of Will. What I think Schop emphasized most was that Will is the hidden aspect that may give us an understanding of what is behind the scenes of the phenomenal. The idea that the phenomenal is actually an illusion only makes sense in the context of the idea that humans may not realize the inner aspect, and take the phenomenal for all there is. — schopenhauer1

The language of veils is his, not mine.

I don't think it's about a 'soul' -- all these things are based on contingent social privileges, but they are ones I don't realistically see changing any time soon, and in fact they seem to be getting further entrenched. Maybe they have some non-accidental grounding in biology, but that doesn't mean it's essential.

Mostly I try to read what people write when they aren't in public and so don't have to save face. That's why I like the internet so much. And I read a lot of feminist literature too.

You're right, I don't really have anecdotes, because I don't (and try not to) spend much time around women. Some people might think that you're in a worse position to judge with less personally at stake. but there's a flip side to that, being too personally invested can make you refuse to see what might be obvious to someone without that investment.

If you want!

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

There is a certain phenotype, for example, that likes DFW. I understand, and I think you do too, that you fit that phenotype to a T. But I don't think that's a point against you -- it's just part of a personality.

I don't mean to be rude, but your meeting me halfway isn't really of any value to me. Thank you for listening, though.

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

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

No, I'm definitely racist in a lot of ways. I don't feel good or bad about it. I mostly just want out.

I don't. Truth be told, I don't really like being around them -- and I think it's similar to the way a lot of black people don't like being around white people. I think both attitudes are totally understandable. Being around people who dehumanize and hate you takes its toll -- I shouldn't be obligated to seek their company or favor, and certainly not to gain credibility in pointless internet arguments. I think that's what it boils down to, really -- I think women genuinely and deeply hate men. (I don't blame them for this hatred. Like I said, I agree with the radfems -- but I just don't want to be around them).

Maybe, but just because something can change doesn't mean it will. I have no hope for it myself.

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

I don't know man, with all due respect, I don't give a single shit what your girlfriend is. 'But I know a...' responses really don't matter.

It's part of why I hate the whole 'men and women of the armed service' bit. Yes, there are women in the armed service. But the inclusion of women alongside men in the phrase serves to eliminate the pain of men by somehow suggesting that the male relationship with the military and violent death is anything like the female. People are afraid to say it, don't care if it's swept under the rug, because only when women die or feel pain is it bad. But no, war first and foremost kills men. Everything first and foremost kills men.

It's obvious that a poor person has a worse shake at absolutely everything regardless of gender. But yeah, correcting for wealth, men have it worse as far as the cracks. We fill the cracks of the world, it's literally built on our bodies. And the cracks that get filled by men hold women up. To women, and to other men, we're just putty.

I've felt my share of loneliness in life -- I've gone long periods of time without interacting personally with anyone at all. That said I've always been privileged and thank God for that privilege. I have always had a family, a home to go back to, and enough money to live comfortably. I understand what I experience is just a glimpse of what so many men go through on a daily basis. Yes, women may go through it too -- but not because they are women, in this way. A woman has to either have something horrible happen to her, or be severely physically and/or mentally handicapped or disturbed, in order not to have friends. Normal men don't have friends all the time. That's just how it works. No one wants men, by and large, and no one is going to stick up for them.

Also, battlefields are not just ancient, and the insinuation that they are is a little disturbing.

It's interesting you think it's an essential gender divide. Men by and large don't hit rock bottom either. — csalisbury

Men very often hit rock bottom -- one of the things in my life that I'm most thankful for has been the way the internet has allowed these men who have hit rock bottom to talk to each other and share these frustrations, so that I can listen to them. Of course, the true rock bottom is where you can't even get on the internet from the public library!

Do you believe there is a 'glass floor?' That's basically what I'm getting at.

I pass homeless women every day on my walk to work. — csalisbury

OK, but you pass more homeless men -- far more. Unless you live in a very weird place. I don't deny generalizations have exceptions, fine.

The sheltered/non-sheltered distinction non-trivially correlates with the female/male distinction in certain ways. Women by and large will simply never have the 'wake up experience' of becoming truly alone and homeless, utterly discarded by society, in the street or on a battlefield. Some will, but most that will are men. That's just how it works.

But I barely know that world anymore. You may be right in terms of academia too, I'm not sure. — csalisbury

I live in academia now, and in my experience it's pretty sexless. Men tend more commonly to have feminine voice patterns and affections, and likewise for women with masculine ones. It's actually pretty jarring to leave back into the 'real world,' you sometimes forget how dimorphic (physically and socially) men and women are outside of the ivory tower. Universities tend to flatten that, which can sometimes be good.

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

I have been depressed, but I'm not really right now. I've had highs and lows and I know the former are nothing compared to the latter. I try to keep this in mind even as my temporary psychological state changes. I want a correct philosophical position, not an outlet for my passing urges.

But I just ate a bowl of ice cream. That was nice. — darthbarracuda

Heh. I doubt it.

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

I think that life's pressures and pains are so pervasive, so obvious, so intense, and so inevitable that whatever pleasures there may be that aren't just reliefs from them are negligible by comparison.

It feels like you're conflating fuck-yeah tumblr feminism with women as a whole, kinda. I don't like fuck-yeah tumblr feminism either. — csalisbury

No, I don't think so -- nu-feminism is really beside the point, although I think it's more conservative than it lets on, in that the way it plays out is a reflection of old, deeply-held ideas about how the genders do and should interact (woman as victim, man as agent). If you like it's just one passing shape of how these things work. (I like radfems because they tend to be radical as they claim).

But yeah, beside all that I think men and women as a whole see the world in fundamentally different ways. It might be hard to articulate, and of course it has exceptions, but that's fine, it's there. I'm not going to deny the relationships you've had with women who profess these existential anxieties. All the same I wonder if you would admit even a tendency in what I'm saying.

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

A concrete example for you, csal, since I know you like DFW (definitely a 'male-oriented' author):

What I’ve noticed at readings, is that the people who seem most enthusiastic and moved by it are young men. Which I guess I can understand — I think it’s a fairly male book, and I think it’s a fairly nerdy book.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

Feminists are always saying this. Feminists are saying white males say, 'Okay, I'm going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my phallus on the consciousness of the world.'

Yes women read him, but not as much, and not in the same way. And many women mock men for reading him because it is a typical thing for a male of a certain age social status and education level to do.

Do you think it's possible that you associate this existential displacement with men because you discuss these issues mostly with men? — csalisbury

Maybe. But you can see it, IMO, in the kind of art men v. women create. There are exceptions -- Kate Chopin seemed to have 'the gene,' whatever it was, which is why The Awakening pisses off so many women who read it despite being ostensibly feminist. These trends in art were noticed by second-wave feminists -- Valerie Solanas has this great bit on male art that I pretty much agree with, but I still like male art for all that. It's not a perfect correlation, but it's pretty hard to deny. (Actually, I pretty much agree with the radfems on everything).

There's also just the fact that any time a gender-neutral space is set up to discuss this sort of displacement, they become male-domainated, and that the ranks of the disenfranchised, alone, radical, etc. tend to swell disproportionately with men (as do the homeless, dead, and suicidal). So it's hard to tell which way the bias runs. If you ask a woman what she thinks being lonely is, and a man, prepare for very different answers.

Huh, yeah, I'm not going to scold you out of political correctness or anything like that, what's true is true, but what you're saying doesn't align with my experience. Do you have any sisters or many close female friends? — csalisbury

Sure, but I've connected far more with men than women, because I empathize with their struggles more. I think by and large women feel entitled to their lives being kept in stasis by male suffering. And men are okay with that and perpetuate it. It's not about men being angels and women devils -- it's in very large part men's fault that this is how they are.

The best way I can try to put it is this. Men suffer in feeling a kind of existential displacement. They feel fundamentally alone, not at home in the world, and are hurt because deep down they have (and feel like they have) nothing. Women suffer in feeling slights agains their rightful place. That is, they are confident that they have some place in the world and are entitled to the rights that come with it, suffering in reaction to this expectation being disappointed in some way. The world is 'for' women, men just form the plaster that lets them sit in it (with their dead bodies etc.)

Maybe one day we'll reach a point where everyone is settled down and all their material needs are met and they'll stop having kids altogether rather than reaching some equilbrium. I guess? — csalisbury

Maybe. I think people would probably have a population panic if the whole world's population was on the decline and try to institute programs to inflate it. But I think no one individually would actually want to bear the burden of having more children themselves (else they'd do it without the programs). I don't know, it all gets pretty sci-fi even decades in the future at this point.

At this point I think it's totally possible that the whole world turns into a third-world hellhole. institutions are more fragile than people tend to think.

and philosophical positions generally do not admit of evidence, — John

Sure they do -- but this insight into how you see the matter is illuminating, I guess.

OK, I disagree. So what?

I don't understand how anything could be evidence against your position. Not seeing something as something for you is just evidence you see it 'as' something indistinct.