Sorry, but I don't think there is a "human craving for justification on matters of life and death." I think some humans crave that, but it's foolish to do so, and I know of nothing which makes it a necessary human characteristic, i.e. a part of being human. And like it or not, humans are as much a part of nature as any other animal. — Ciceronianus
than hit-and-run — AmadeusD
I've stated and clarified my position. My apologies if it's still not clear enough. You antinatalists seem to worry yourselves about what you can't change or control and thereby make yourselves more miserable than you need to be, then spread that self-inflicted, pointless misery in order to have company. You wish were never born, or 'that is a better to never have been born', and yet, like other antinatalists, you're very much still here – apparently, surprise surprise, you'd rather suffer than 'not to be' – oh, but that's self-refuting, ain't it? Well anyway, good luck with all that, Amadeus – tediously spoon-feeding ain't my jam, so I'm off to find a more substantive topic to chew on. — 180 Proof
Ive had his position explained to me, and respect it. If i've said something dumb, it must be super-challenging to address it after several years of doing it for other people.
It's unhelpful for me, but he has his reasons — AmadeusD
But its not his circus if i say something stupid. — AmadeusD
'Humans are not the only animals capable of slow and thoughtful deliberation.' Orca hunting, corvid theory of mind, are other examples that demonstrate complex deliberative thought.
The more general point I am making is that you and Ligotti are in my view mistakenly describing action driven by the 'emotional' as somehow inaccurate and wrong. What is the case for that? It seems to me to privilege an imagined 'rationality' that in action can't be separated from emotion: the two are intertwined. — mcdoodle
Hold fast to the center — unenlightened
The cunning of Geist is to use your suffering and your despair to hold you to its purpose. One fantasy fights another. — unenlightened
I doubt anyone would claim we're the same as other animals in all respects, but our differences don't make us any less natural — Ciceronianus
And so just stick to that and don't try to be cute about it by hedging on the word "natural", which we all know humans are in the strictest sense of "made of natural stuff, evolved naturally".I doubt anyone would claim we're the same as other animals in all respects, — Ciceronianus
We don't have to be like the other animals or the lilies of the field to avoid ruminating obsessively on the fact that our existence isn't sanctioned by the universe or justified by it in some sense. — Ciceronianus
If we speak of poetry we need only "cast a cold eye" on life and death, and pass by as Yeats put it in his poem Under Ben Bulben and his gravestone. — Ciceronianus
No one is saying that the "universe needs to sanction our existence". Rather the point is that we are not like the rest of existence and this leads to a unique circumstance and shifts our mode of being- one of deliberative means, and self-reflection. — schopenhauer1
So do I but I can't learn anything from time-wasting questions like yours which a close, or careful, reading of my posts make unnecessary. Lazy (shallow) responses get old quick – especially semantic muddles & word salads. Disagreements are great only when they are substantive and thereby facilitate reciprocal learning.I want to learn!! — AmadeusD
So do I but I can't learn anything from time-wasting questions like yours which a close, or careful, reading of my posts make unnecessary. Lazy (shallow) responses get old quick – especially semantic muddles & word salads. Disagreements are great only when they are substantive and thereby facilitate reciprocal learning. — 180 Proof
I find this take in existence interesting. It reminds me of the "blind idiot god": Humanity has found it's god, it's creator, only to discover that it's like a terrible monster, a blind idiot with neither desires nor goals that just shambles forwards mercilessly.
In that sense we can view humans as an "excess". Humans are the product of a runaway process of increased mental capacity, which randomly gave us consciousness. Less some crowning achievement and more some weird freak. — Echarmion
I think it's useful to keep such a perspective in your "arsenal", so to speak. The idea that life is not "about" anything and that there's no reason to assume your existence is built around happiness as some general state can be liberating. — Echarmion
As Ray Brassier wrote in the Foreward to Conspiracy:Assuming you mean "abnormal" or "unnatural" in that sense, while it's true those words are sometimes used in reference to monsters and freaks, I don't see why our abnormality would in that case condemn us to the state of misery which seems to be referred to in this thread. — Ciceronianus
We know what verdict is reserved for those foolhardy enough to dissent
from the common conviction according to which “being alive is all right,”
to borrow an insistent phrase from the volume at hand. Disputants of the
normative buoyancy of our race can expect to be chastised for their
ingratitude, upbraided for their cowardice, patronized for their
shallowness. Where self-love provides the indubitable index of psychic
health, its default can only ever be seen as a symptom of psychic debility.
Philosophy, which once disdained opinion, becomes craven when the
opinion in question is whether or not being alive is all right. Suitably
ennobled by the epithet “tragic,” the approbation of life is immunized
against the charge of complacency and those who denigrate it condemned
as ingrates.
“Optimism”; “pessimism”: Thomas Ligotti takes the measure of these
discredited words, stripping them of the patina of familiarity that has
robbed them of their pertinence, and restoring to them some of their
original substance. The optimist fixes the exchange rate between joy and
woe, thereby determining the value of life. The pessimist, who refuses the
principle of exchange and the injunction to keep investing in the future no
matter how worthless life’s currency in the present, is stigmatized as an
unreliable investor.
The Conspiracy against the Human Race sets out what is perhaps the
most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would
oblige us to be eternally grateful for a “gift” we never invited. Being alive
is not all right: this simple not encapsulates the temerity of thinking better
than any platitude about the tragic nobility of a life characterized by a
surfeit of suffering, frustration, and self-deceit. There is no nature worth
revering or rejoining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as captain of its
own fate; there is no future worth working towards or hoping for. Life, in
Ligotti’s outsized stamp of disapproval, is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.
No doubt, critics will try to indict Ligotti of bad faith by claiming that the
writing of this book is itself driven by the imperatives of the life that he
seeks to excoriate. But the charge is trumped-up, since Ligotti explicitly
avows the impossibility for the living to successfully evade life’s grip.
This admission leaves the cogency of his diagnosis intact, for as Ligotti
knows full well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life’s
lie will be a sublimated lie.
9
Such sublimation is as close to truth-telling as Ligotti’s exacting nihilism
will allow. Unencumbered by the cringing deference towards social utility
that straightjackets most professional philosophers, Ligotti’s unsparing
dissection of the sophisms spun by life’s apologists proves him to be a
more acute pathologist of the human condition than any sanctimonious
philanthrope. — CATHR - Foreward
Just wondering- do you think there is a difference between an orca hunting in deliberative ways, or even playing games like toss the the human into the sea, and human levels of deliberation? I did not say that other animals can't deliberate, but that our being is of an existential one, whereby deliberation is our primary modus operendi. — schopenhauer1
Humans need s[e]lves for their being. They can't stand it. It does divide us from the rest of creation. We are aware that we are aware that we are aware, and that does make us a different kind of creature. — schopenhauer1
shuts down dialogue. If you are open to actually creating an interesting dialogue about that which you comment, let me know. — schopenhauer1
You're free to elucidate why you think humans are special, and lend some credibility to the OP passages. Doesn't seem to appear anywhere - and i think dismissing the objections in teh same fashion might be an issue? — AmadeusD
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