In my philosophy book where I coined those terms ontophilia and ontophobia, I do say that I think ontophilia is the referent of theologically noncognitivist conceptions of God. Also nirvana, eudaimonia, ataraxia, etc.

The latter terms are less problematic because they are explicitly about a state of mind, while “God” sounds like you’re talking about something outside your mind, which is causing those feelings, rather than just talking about the feelings.

There seems to be a lot of self-hatred in regard to suicidal thoughts in my view. Strength or the perception of having strength seems to be a theme of those suffering from suicidal thoughts in my view,

At least in my case, I've always perceived being as weak as something that prevented me from accepting myself.

And, as an American, I value strength.

I just realized that in my reply to csalisbury’s reply to you, which was also meant to address your reply to me, I forgot to emphasize something important I meant to clarify: that ontophilia does not feel like a distraction from the obsessions of ontophobia, when feeling ontophilic I’m not merely not-thinking about death etc and filling time with something you else, but rather I can think about death etc without falling into a pit of crippling despair, and dispassionately think “ok, I don’t want that, I’ll do what I can to avoid it whenever opportunity to make a decision comes up and otherwise not worry about it when there’s nothing else to be done at the moment”, and I don’t feel like I need to fill time, I feel comfortable just existing in the moment and not like I need some kind of distraction. Ontophilia is not just avoiding the problems ontophobia fixates on, it’s dissolving them, and in doing so attaining a clearer calmer and more functional state of mind wherein you are more capable of solving real problems (including those that factor into avoiding death etc) because you’re not frozen in despair gazing into the infinite void of the future, but instead just content to be here now and do what you can to continue doing so and accepting of whatever you can’t do anything about.

It could be little more than an unconscious accumulation of avoided metaphorical ‘deaths’?

I reckon it basically comes down to facing your fears and/or slipping over the edge. Stagnation, for whatever reason, is most likely a great player in turning little metaphorical ‘deaths’ into a literal suicidal episode.

I doubt it’s anywhere near that simplistic as there is ‘simple’ biochemistry involved too.

I once met a childhood trauma specialist who had become an alcoholic and sex addict. He didn't make the connection for a while. Traumatized in childhood, obsessed with trauma. It didn't click. But he was fucked up and he knew that. He wasn't just a sex addict. He had a specific fetish -married women. What got him going was knowing they were drawn to him (avatar of the abyss) in favor of their beau. There's a thesis to be written on the relation between violation and pessimism.

I wonder to what extent something like this subtends the whole pessimistic approach. — csalisbury

I'm a pessimist. Abandoned by my father as a young child but otherwise well loved and cared for by my mother et al till this day. Violated, I suppose; even violent in my teens & 20s via playing contact sports and brawling for a living as bar/club bouncer, but I've never violated a woman sexually or betrayed lovers or friends (except in self-defense) or beatdown anyone but assholes trying to do the same to me. Very much a pessimist, though not what's clinically referred to as 'depressive realist'. Softy for cats, dogs & kids - without any being mine. Booze & blues, books & bootycalls, hiking & flâneurie ... have kept my sense of the absurd, or despair, risably tragicomic. Cheerful - because the worst that I expect never happens - pessimist aka (reluctant) "happy warrior". If one's more extroverted, anti-social or PTSD'd by life, I suppose pessimism would thrive, so to speak, on violating ...

I often think about that guy and how he ended his relationships with the women whose lives he ruptured and how he made sense of that. David Foster Wallace did a story on this in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - maybe the presence of the destroying force was necessary to educate the destroyed. Who knows? — csalisbury

Maybe ... echopraxia? To educate in how to destroy or how to stop destroying or how to stop being an accomplice to one's own self-destruction. :chin:

What happens before the crisis is you have certain ideas about how and why to live. The crisis burns them all away. Whatever is left after is what's valuable. The only thing that helps in my opinion is that it's necessary, and that it passes. — csalisbury

Value of deep scars: they never lie.

You can't know why it's necessary or what it's doing until after, so no peptalk and positive talk will help. But it does pass. If it's really really really impossibly bad, you're getting close to the release, and you have to just hold on. — csalisbury

Yeah, but a hand holds on to every thing except itself ...

The difficulty is that, in ontophobia, you can't access the quality, for lack of a better word, of ontophilic space. You can only see it conceptually as something opposed to the ontophobic. So it has no fullness, or reality of its own. — csalisbury

Like a quasi-affective retrograde amnesia ... where memories & moods "encoded" with positive, affirming, self-serving emotions are blocked from cognitive access and conscious awareness, and ... a negative feedback loop reinforcing only the depressive episode (or condition)?

(Concept makes sense, will check "the literature" and report back ... or not )

I've kept company with a few depressives and survived more than my share of suicides and found myself helplessly without to access that inner vortex pulling him or her away and within. Bad trips and seizure-like drunken blackouts and concussive curb-stomps, and yet all i can imagine is something like

being confined to a skull that feels less & less your own like a horrified child running blindly through an ancient, creeking, ramshackled, winding maze of a sprawled-out structure 'full of sound and fury signifying nothing' but (the promise of more) pain, with no doors, no windows, no way up or outside, only steps down in the dark, wet slicked steps, further, deeper, pulled downward ... ●

Ok. Gotcha.

In my philosophy book where I coined those terms ontophilia and ontophobia, I do say that I think ontophilia is the referent of theologically noncognitivist conceptions of God. Also nirvana, eudaimonia, ataraxia, etc.

The latter terms are less problematic because they are explicitly about a state of mind, while “God” sounds like you’re talking about something outside your mind, which is causing those feelings, rather than just talking about the feelings. — Pfhorrest

I'm not sure they are less problematic. For instance why wouldn't you say that objects are states of mind, instead of things outside mind that are causing their perception? It seems to me there is this widespread arbitrary assumption of interpreting feelings as internal states of mind, while interpreting other perceptions as showing us what's outside mind.

I would say a more coherent view would be to interpret feelings as perceptions too, as showing us something. And to not arbitrarily interpret some experiences as perceptions and some other experiences as states of mind, but to interpret all experiences as perceptions. All experiences would be the mind perceiving something. The mind wouldn't stem from the brain, rather the mind would act on the brain to control the body.

And then when you feel engulfed in love, you could interpret it as what's really happening, rather than seeing it as a mere state of mind, as an internal brain state. Love would be a real thing that we perceive, and when that thing passes through the body it is what would change the brain state, rather than the feeling being a manifestation of the brain state. The feeling could very well be telling you about something that the other senses do not see. There are plenty of things that the eyes see that other senses do not see, maybe feelings are senses too, ways of seeing things that other senses do not see.

I'm not claiming this is what truly is the case, but I'm thinking about it now, and for some reason it seems to make more sense to me than the usual conception.

fwiw, I was a baby-boy, too-nurtured. Might have been ok, but crisis (age ~14). If Mom & Dad didn't lose it, I probably would have been fine classwise- not full middleclass, exactly, but I would have been socioeconomically blanketed. They did lose it: divorce, roman catholic social snubbing. Family friends with a professional class who really did let us go, quicker and easier than you'd expect. Social equals to objects of occasional charity in a snap.

I was - am- the oldest of five. Safe six-figure family became mom of five on a ~30k teachers salary. Dad had a waspy background but no interfamilial respect and lawyered away financial support. Shitbag guy - became a lobbyist in DC for the motorcycle industry, of all things. Might as well have hit reset and started a new life, though he did offer to buy me a couch once.

Sob story, but everything is relative. It was very difficult to go from socially ensconced to persona non grata. It did suck. Cause, dude, it's hard to make that change at 14. Socially Situated Handsome Grandson to 'rumors are he's a heroin addict'. It's funny in retrospect, but it wasn't at the time. (Of course plenty of people are 'rumors are he's shitty' cradle-to-grave, and I lucked out of that. I realize my sob story isn't the sobbiest)

What this did is make me mad. I already was mad (on account of normal nerdy-kid social struggles and normal oedipal family dynamics) but I got real mad. Super mad. It's still there, and still irrational. I'm mad mostly all the time and I hate it. I don't think straight, almost ever.

Anyway, that's my story. And it's sort of a lie, because I'm packing it up too neatly, which... I mean the first part of your post is, in some ways, a dressed-up dating profile.Which is what all the preceding was too. So.

When I date, I'm smart, but shy, introverted but clever
I'm 'this seems right' for ~three months. Nice guy but when you try to get intimate....[being confined to a skull that feels less less your own like a horrified child running blindly through an ancient, creeking, ramshackled, winding maze of a sprawling structure 'full of sound and fury signifying nothing' but (the promise of more) pain, with no doors, no windows, no way up or outside, only down steps in the dark, wet slicked steps, down darker, further, deeper, pulled downward ... ]

yes, exactly. but how do you say that? you don't. You don't, you can't. You just pretend and get more distant and sadder and lonelier and madder. (big caveat here.There is a thing where you can do the identity of the guy who says the thing you said (the prose descent) as Tortured Hero. That might work, to some extent. But it only works in a limited way. The Tortured Hero is supposed to act like the Tortured Hero, and not like the actual torturing thing the tortured hero suffers from.)

Now nothing is less sympathetic than an ok-appearing white guy BUT (counterpoint) fuck you, i've spent my last fifteen years feeling like teeth dragged five miles down shitty backroad pavemet. I've clung with all my might to schopenhauer and cioran and beckett and Krasznahorkai and so forth. But what are they doing? ( I have a theory here. )

~

On face value I surmise that this makes sense. But, the issue is that suicide, even in a deterministic universe is still self-harm. You can't really get around this fact. — Wallows

Is it safe to say in a completely deterministic universe that there is even 'self' in which one can choose to harm? If the the thinking thing or "I" as defined in "I think therefore I am", isn't even real as we define it but instead merely part of the plethora of other things that exists outside which simultaneously die and come to life every day of our lives, then one's own death is pretty much moot in a deterministic universe other than the moral, social, and psychological ramifications we give it. And if someone finds out that that they are merely one of many redundant cogs in a very large machine that it can be difficult to justify such beliefs or illusions depending on how they view it.

The odd thing is suicide and certain similar behavior seems pretty predictable yet nobody really cares most of the time when someone offs themselves since there are often obvious underlining reasons for them doing so and/or that they a really didn't play that much of a role in society any longer (which I believe has been a common reason for people to commit suicide through out history),

I think a lot of pressure can be put on some demographics in modern society to commit suicide, sort of a bogus analogy with biological "programmed cell death", as if its healthy for society as organism. That's why its important to make an effort at going beyond minimum obligations, so as to make sure our acquaintances have dependable social supports and always remain close to someone, because a chance exists that the isolated will become targets of crushing stigma. One more conceptually absurd cultural ideal - "society as organism" - to easily get abused by maliciousness.