Step (1): Characterise life as loss.
Step (2): Characterise loss as nobly as possible.
Step (3): Forget nobility transmitted to life by transitive property. — fdrake
The best pains, and joys, take us by surprise. We suddenly find ourselves stricken or fulfilled, and we're never the same again. These transformative surprises are what inspire action, not the humdrum banality of suffering or the dull rises of fleeting happiness. — fdrake
When the need is urgent, pessimism falls silent, real loss arrests us, we contemplate in its wake, not apprehending it in advance as intellectual pop art. — fdrake
That is not what most Philosophical Pessismists are doing. Deprivation is the root of most ideas of structural suffering. Nobility seems to be a shifty adjective in this conception as well. — schopenhauer1
Deprivation structurally in that post is potential loss. You've made a few examples of it. This is precisely what I was talking about; too much thought about dealing with potential harm intellectually, not enough about dealing with real harm practically. — fdrake
I think that he means to highlight the absurdity of suicide. The torment that a person has suffered has already subsided by the time that they decide to do so. You don't actually end any suffering as you have already been through whatever it is that drives a person to commit suicide in the first place. It seems to be a bleak and somewhat capricious dismissal of that a person should commit suicide from a pessimistic perspective. It's funny. He is coping with his worldview through a somewhat odd, but, ultimately positive black humor. — thewonder
I like this quote. Thanks for introducing me to this author. — thewonder
Cioran is one of my favorite philosophers, but if you want to understand his aphorisms it is more appropriate to understand them within 1) the context of the work in which it appears, since they are often thematic, and 2) within his overall anti-systemic philosophy, which only really goes through a major change from his very early work (viz. his Romanian works) and later works (French works). Quite of few of the aphorisms presented here, while seemingly incoherent or contradictory on their own are easily understandable within the context of his overall thought, which remained consistent from A Short History of Decay and beyond. — Maw
_______The pursuits, hopes of attainment, and actual attainments of the goods themselves do not necessarily make life less negative. In fact, that could inform us of the fact that we are deprived already. Always overcoming or dealing with something. — schopenhauer1
Both views take as given a static reference point where anything can be considered a plus-stroke or a minus-stroke situated along [bad] and [good] axes. — csalisbury
Echoing fdrake, I have a sense that transformation happens when you don't judge things as good or bad, you take them as they are, and figure out how to work through them/with them.* The only way to work through anything is to is let go of the grid of concepts that lets you organize everything from without. Which puts the 'something' in danger of no longer being preserved - but really that shouldn't matter, because whatever is preserved is preserved too late. — csalisbury
If you shut yourself in, it goes without saying everything will seem to repeat futilely. Ecclesiastes ,so the legend goes, was written by a King - those guys are famous for being trapped in a world of artifice. Movie pitch : King Midas only everything he touches turns to an illustration of structurally necessary suffering. — csalisbury
*canonical TV-pessimist Rust Cohle is misread as truth-speaking hero when the show telegraphs, frequently, that his Pessimism is a defense against working through his guilt over his daughter's death. 'Our planet's a gutter in the abbatoir of the slums of the ghetto of the universe' is way less meaningful than 'I was responsible for my daughter's death. But it's easier to deal with. — csalisbury
Can you elaborate on that? — schopenhauer1
but an examination instead of the inner logic of the framework, how it functions as a psychological support etc. — Baden
But, with the structural perspective, you still have minus-strokes. Only now you have a conceptual apparatus that allows you to see them as contingent instances of a general harm. Both perspectives (contingent harm/necessary-structural) bring with them a certain way of looking at things - as though you had a cartesian grid with an 'origin' of neutrality from which you could determine the positivity or negativity of a state by seeing where it is in relation to that originI see this plus-stroke or minus-stroke more characteristic of contingent harms. Structural harm would be a constant in the equation. — schopenhauer1
Well, that is a default. We are always working through them. In that sense, philosophy is always preserved too late- or anything that is descriptive of the situation rather than the primary situation discussed. Philosophy is mainly looking at things through analysis and description, so in that way, all that can be done is to describe the world through words, and then to analyze what is the case from that secondary response. Otherwise, there is just silence. However, if philosophy is any form of therapy for the pessimist, this secondary world would suffice, if not just for catharsis and to understand better what is going on. — schopenhauer1
Perhaps the king sees better what is the case? Same with Buddha, who was a prince, right? The assumption then is something along the lines of, "Cultivate your flowers". We are certainly put in abusive situations and then have the need to justify them. But if you "step up" and "get er done" perhaps it will all work out, right? Comply, comply, do not deny. Life is a struggle, but the struggle brings meaning, right? Everything is what it is, right? — schopenhauer1
No, the screenwriter didn't want to leave the viewer with a Sunday night/Monday morning feeling (metaphorically speaking), but rather a Friday night/Saturday morning feeling. — schopenhauer1
But, with the structural perspective, you still have minus-strokes. Only now you have a conceptual apparatus that allows you to see them as contingent instances of a general harm. Both perspectives (contingent harm/necessary-structural) bring with them a certain way of looking at things - as though you had a cartesian grid with an 'origin' of neutrality from which you could determine the positivity or negativity of a state by seeing where it is in relation to that origin — csalisbury
Ok, but two points. The first I've made before.
(1) It may be cathartic the first time around, but then its diminishing returns. Catharsis becomes addiction very quickly. Catharsis is freeing. Addiction looks like a compulsion to repeat.
(2) I don't mean to say that philosophy should be the thing itself, rather than a delayed reflection. I'm trying to suggest that this particular philosophy is trying to 'freeze' the thing itself in a certain way, to have control over it. Good philosophy ought to change in accordance with life. Pessimism isn't like that. It installs itself, sets down roots, and then translates everything that passes by into revalidations of itself. — csalisbury
Do you mean that friday night/saturday morning is gritty and real and sunday night/monday morning is fluffy and false? If so, I'm trying to say that Cohle's pessimism is wayyy less gritty than the thing he's avoiding. — csalisbury
But I would still say this isn't quite right in regards to structural suffering. Structural suffering means that the there are no countable minus-strokes, as the phenomena is just always in the background. Examples would include deprivation, and challenges to overcome. These are always in play once born, by definition. — schopenhauer1
The fluxes of various emotional states do not have as much to do with this aesthetic understanding of life. — schopenhauer1
Nick Pizzolatto was the screenwriter. His inspiration was Thomas Ligotti's Conspiracy Against the Human Race. That book is a non-fiction book on Pessimism that is unrelenting in its gloom, but he knew that this would be too much to maintain it to the very end on a mini-series. — schopenhauer1
Right but this transcendental root of suffering, if you like, says that there are guaranteed to be minus strokes. What makes these minus strokes minus strokes minus strokes? The same view, the same grid, that the mere seer of contingent harm, uses to evaluate a stroke's bad/good valence. Structural suffering still retains the view where any given moment can be treated in isolation as bad or good. It just goes a step further and explains why there will always be bad moments and how they'll far outweigh the good. — csalisbury
If you're implying that the aesthetic is above flux, that strikes me as clearly false. If you have a certain rainbow over a waterfall metaphor for the aesthetic, that could *sound* true, but the pull of that metaphor is itself is due to a flux in emotional state. — csalisbury
Let's suppose I grant you this argument. I don't necessarily, but just for the sake of argument- what does this prove or not prove? I can always say the grid is simply the background that is always there once born and thus itself is part of the structure. — schopenhauer1
Not sure what you mean. — schopenhauer1
Snarkily : there are ways of looking at one's life that aren't centered, like room service, around how comfortable you are. Use it the wrong way and Baden gills (which I am in favor of) can simply become a demand for air-conditioning plus an awareness of inevitable outages, and the Final Outage. — csalisbury
Can you speak more about 'compliance' ? — csalisbury
The rainbow metaphor is Schop. I'm saying he had recourse to the fluctuating emotional states of his readers when he deployed it. It works, its a good image, but it works because he knew how to use words to modulate affective states. — csalisbury
life as a problem isn't something to be solved, but simply to be endured — Maw
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” — schopenhauer1
"It is impossible to be judged by someone who has suffered less than we have. And as each one believes himself to be an unrecognized Job..." — Matias
“Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.
Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.” — schopenhauer1
Toute exégèse est profanation. — Cioran
“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?” — schopenhauer1
"I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope."
—Cioran — Baden
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