Go back a step, then: Misanthropy is the moral condemnation of humanity.

Not the hatred of humanity, but the recognition of their moral culpability. The cited article seeks to "recognise the moral awfulness of humanity without drifting into hatred, violence, or despair".

...the real philosophical task isn’t about living out a single misanthropic stance; it’s about dealing with the emotionally and morally difficult oscillation between stances. Coping with this is the heart of the misanthropic predicament.

Thanks for the article. I think it helps to recognise the broader potential of humanity: both the tendency towards ignorance, isolation and exclusion, as well as our capacity for awareness, connection and collaboration. I think this is partly why I, too, find myself vacillating between the Activist and the Quietist. It’s hope, I guess: a quiet confidence that genuine and stable leaps forward have occurred as a minority movement - a barely noticeable yet progressive creep, not a bloody revolution.

Cheers. I'd read the article a month ago, and was intending to post something, but bypassed it in a bunch of other threads. Recent events brought me back to it.

The take-home is that half of eligible voters wanted to put their trust in a liar. — Banno

The tick is to be exasperated, but not to despair. Things improve, in small steps. Perhaps.

Misanthropy, the desperate realisation that all we have to work with is each other. — Banno

"Hell is other people" ___Sartre

"Hell is other people" ___Sartre
You'd hypothesize that one of most history's most revered Existentialists would confer a greater value onto the material subject of his philosophy.

In the TS Humanism is given an explanation. Thats pretty bold IMHO. What humanism is, is up for the grabs even more than misantropy. Some fluffy benelovent feelings toward people in general. The wealthy left do have kind of kidnapped the term for the moment, but "work together" does not seem to cover that contemporary version. Or any version I have heard about.

But common for the two, Humanism and Misantropy seems both to want to construe a simplified, holistic view of the world, to escape from the messiness world have.

The [tr]ick is to be exasperated, but not to despair. Things improve, in small steps. Perhaps. — Banno

I'm reminded of

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. — Antonio Gramsci

My own 'misanthropy' is absurdist, rather than existential, in the similiar vein of a posthuman (posthumous?) conjecture à la

Man is a rope [ ... ] he is a bridge and not an end. — Freddy Zarathustra

such that 'all we have is each other' to bring about a succcessor species or, more likely, prematurely our own extinction.

"Hell is other people" ___Sartre
You'd hypothesize that one of most history's most revered Existentialists would confer a greater value onto the material subject of his philosophy. — Aryamoy Mitra

Uh, no. I have no hypothesis. Just a tongue-in-cheek quote. :joke:

I entirely concur. I was merely conveying that given the character of the quote, one would hypothesize the above. 'You' was used interchangeably; I wasn't referring specifically to your quotation, but was rather inferring a conclusion from it.

The cited article seeks to "recognise the moral awfulness of humanity without drifting into hatred, violence, or despair". — Banno

There are only two ways to do that: acceptance or delusion.

Humanity shouldn't be judged as people are too different from each other. Really, any attempt to judge humanity will show the interests and interpretations of the intellect above anything else. Humans in the aggregate can be judged with sweeping generalisations but any one human is too complex for anyone to fully understand. Misanthropy may be emotionally satisfying but it's intellectually shallow and pointless.

Humanity shouldn't be judged... — Judaka

And yet you so judge.

SO is heaven.

Delusions have their place.

↪Gnomon
SO is heaven. — Banno

So Heaven also needs Humanism? :smile:

The classic banno response.

Delusions have their place. — Banno

Cant get through the day without one or two.