Some more thoughts on this:

Pleasures and pains seem to be connected to the resolution of problems. Of course, one can stimulate the brain and produce pleasurable experiences without resolving a problem per se, but the fact is that pleasures evolved to act as a reward-and-motivating system whereas pains evolved to act as a motivating system only.

Generally, when we have a problem, we experience some degree of pain, which notifies us to act. We then act, and, depending on the intensity of the pain, we act either because we wish to experience pleasure or because we wish to get rid of the pain. For example, I eat food primarily because I'm hungry, but I don't eat it in order to remove a bad feeling necessarily but also because I desire to experience the pleasurable food. In addition to being a necessity it's also an opportunity. But if I have a headache I act only to remove the bad feeling.

So in the sense that pleasure accompanies pain in the cycle of desire and need, pleasure becomes merely something that makes an act permissible, but does not act as a reason to do an action. The pleasure has to "make up" for the required pain, instead of actually being a reason in itself. But why? What is the motivating reason behind a suffering-prioritized ethics?

For if we were all super happy all the time, I suspect we might have a different perspective on all this: we would have immediate access to pleasure all the time, recognize it as a good, and wish to multiply the amount. It only seems repugnant or unworthwhile right now because we aren't currently able to conceptualize what this pleasure feels like.

Another idea is that we feel more compassion towards those who are suffering than those who are happy. This would seem to have come from evolution as well - attend to those in the clan who are in more need than others, because those who are happy can fend for themselves.

Generally it seems like we have the intuition that we ought to make people (who already exist) happy, but not make happy people (who do not exist). But this already puts a constraint upon ethics, in which the moral thing to do is "bring people up" rather than make more people who are already up.

Right, that's exactly why I mentioned originally how the desire-view was similar to nominalism - our desires don't make things pleasurable, things are pleasurable and therefore we desire them.

However the adverbialist theory as I understand it holds that there is already a subconscious "directed-ness" that approves of experiences without our control, which results in pleasure and pain.

But my account requires stasis as well as flux. It just says stasis emerges via a limitation on flux. Whereas you have the Parmidean puzzle of how stasis could ever allow change. — apokrisis

In my view, there is static, unchanging substance (or Being), and all of flux has Being, and flux results in the particles we're talking about.

When we conceptualize flux, we imagine things like waves, wind, changing patterns, orbits, chaos, etc. But although this picture's contents are changing, the concept itself is not. What is being presented to us - the given-ness - is the same.

So when I say this substance or Being is static, I don't really mean in the temporal sense. I mean in the metaphysical sense, it is incapable of change. Similar to how Aristotle's Categories are incapable of change, or how the Four Causes cannot themselves change, or how the property-itself of red-ness is incapable of flux. It just is. That's what I've been referring to this whole time when I say it is static.

I do indeed have a puzzle of how this flux all started to begin with, as I suspect you do as well.

Another thing about pain and pleasure is that people can be instrumentalized when they suffer, but they cannot be instrumentalized when they experience pleasure. However, maybe it could be said that someone can be the focal point of pleasure, like a birthday party.

We generally have an intuition that pain is of ethical priority, almost of a totally different kind, than pleasure. What makes this so?

So yes, there is a duality here. But of bottom-up vs top-down modes of causality. And substantial objects are what arise inbetween as the causal actors (in a relatively a-causal void). — apokrisis

So there is a tension between the bottom-up causality of material and efficient causes and the top-down causality of formal and final causation.

I can see how a telos can emerge from a system - look at evolution for example. But what needs to still be explained is why the whole drama of evolution played out the way it did: why such-and-such happened and not something else, and not just by an appeal to material/efficient causation (i.e. science).

So the material cause is what you need for something to be/exist/occur, the efficient cause is the source of motion or change from history, the formal cause is what something is, which is ultimately shaped by final cause. Thus what I am seeing as final causes are not just tendencies or habits as a system evolves but as seemingly static "laws of nature" (mass attracts other mass - it's what it does, sugar dissolves in water, it's what it does); unless these are also evolving tendencies, in which case there needs to be an explanation as to how these tendencies came to be. These natural laws would then be like propositional counterfactual statements.

Which is why I don't think dynamicism can fully account for all of nature. The plant can wave in the wind but the roots keep it stuck in the ground as they are themselves static.

In the sense that A causes B, what makes it the case that A causes B? If it is not an internal power or disposition, but rather an external contextual feature from the surrounding properties, then what causes this external context to be the way it is.

I like Heil's version: properties are dual-nature, both a quality and a disposition. This would work somewhat well into Aristotle's vision of the Soul, in which the Soul is just simply the functional aspect of a living organism. So the mind would be the dispositional aspects of the brain, perhaps taking part in a web of causal relations.

Absolutely love this song and this entire album. So hypnotizing.

Pleasure might be able to be characterized as an attitude we have towards a certain experience, one in which we wish the experience to continue. Certainly all pleasurable experiences are experiences that we wish to continue to experience. The opposite can be said of pain.

Another thing, coming from Levinas, is that pleasure is the act of turning the Other into the Self. For example, eating food turns food (the Other) into something inside of you (the Self). All pleasure thus is the transformation of the Other to the Self.

But there is also the immanent metaphysics of Aristotle where form and purpose are developmentally emergent and self-organising regularities. So the world itself must develop intelligible order. And having done so, that order is imposed locally everywhere to create substantial being. — apokrisis

Did Aristotle argue for self-generalizing habits? I thought that was Peirce's addition - after all, Aristotle did think the universe was eternal if I remember correctly, and that there were distinct natural kinds, something that would have come into conflict with evolution and general cosmological findings but Peirce managed to fill with his idea of habits.

Formal and final cause are better understood as contextual properties or powers rather than intrinsic ones. Material and efficient cause are rightfully located within substantial objects. But the shaping and directing of matter is something that comes from without. — apokrisis

Yes, I can agree to this, especially because final causation can be frustrated by external contextual properties. A mother can abort a baby, thus frustrating the telos of the fetus.

But if these powers exist outside of a substantial form, how do they exist? The mother that aborts the baby still has powers herself, namely, to abort the baby.

Another thing to point out here is that philosophical pessimists generally don't consider themselves "pessimistic", they consider themselves first-and-foremost "realistic" and pessimistic only-in-relation to everyone else's worldview. Hence why I don't think it's a very commonly-used term.

This is what Chalmers calls don't-have-a-clue-materialism:

"I don’t have a clue about consciousness. It seems utterly mysterious to me. But it must be physical, as materialism must be true"

Christoph Fehige argues:

Orexigenic cases are those in which a preference exists and is satisfied.

Prophylactic cases are those in which a preference does not exist (and therefore nothing is satisfied).

Fehige spends a very long time in his paper (A Pareto Principle [...]) discussing why the Orexigenic case is equal to the prophylactic case in value. However, he makes sure to note that the prophylactic case can never be better than the orexigenic case by itself - such would require the addition of additional frustrated preferences.

Personally I have to question why preferences are seen as the basis of morality here. For instance, why is it that a satisfied preference is good? And why is it that we have preferences in the first place?

The reason we have preferences is because we enjoy something - the process of enjoyment is not in-itself strictly a preference. Our preferences are guided in virtue of our ability to enjoy something. This is also why a satisfied preference is good - because it makes the person feel good.

During his essay, Fehige says the following:

"[...]we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers."

However, this strikes me as saying one thing and then negating it right afterwards. By making preferrers satisfied, you are making satisfied preferrers.

So I don't know if preference-based ethics can stand independently from hedonism. All of our preferences can be traced back to whether or not they make us feel pleasure or pain - the advice of the sage to avoid acquiring new preferences is not because these preferences aren't going to make you any better off, but because of the empirical fact that these preferences are oftentimes accompanied by disappointment and pain, which are independent notions of preferences per se.

The question, though, is whether or not the satisfaction of a desire is always equally valuable as the lack of any desire in the first place. I think this is only true is the satisfaction of a desire does not somehow play a part in the overall well-being or "happiness" of a person like eudaimonia. So eudaimonia would, in virtue of its definition, requires the satisfaction of certain desires. And eudaimonia seems to be a good thing.

The problem with the Romantic model of human psychology is that it is pathological rather than scientifically valid. The argument starts and stops with the facts. — apokrisis

I don't know what this means.

It's kind of like the Buddhist's 2nd Noble Truth, right? — schopenhauer1

Yeah. Desires cause stress.

I think all desires are under the first type you described. Some might lead to some sort of tranquility, but usually even these long-term goals of balance and harmony are instrumental in nature. Striving for nothing always. Actually, long-term goals for balance are the height of absurd because of the instrumental nature of any endeavor, noble or otherwise. — schopenhauer1

The problem I see with this view is that it basically means all pleasure is bad, because pleasure is inherently tied to desires, and desires are all bad. Which I think is a bit absurd. I mean I legitimately have fun when I play a video game, or read a book, or go for a walk, read philosophy, etc. I desire to do these things, and I have fun doing them.

Would I be worse off if I didn't have these desires? Perhaps not. But certainly we can at least accept a basic notion that, given two options, a world with satisfied desirers is better than a world with no desirers at all. I say satisfied desirers because I still think that there is a difference between certain desires - some desire satisfactions make you happy, whereas others just eliminate a discomfort.

So my desire for ice cream is more of a disease-desire, since it's not going to really make me happier in the long run. But my desire to, say, understand Nietzsche, will make me happier in the long run.

Sure, I agree in a way about your story of an ever-escalating capacity for "concerns". But that is also baking in the very helplessness that you claim to derive as the conclusion of your argument. — apokrisis

This is the big difference. We both agree that reality can't be controlled in a cosmic sense. But the pessimist then fetishises that as an open-ended source of agony. The pragmatist says that is the way things are - and it really doesn't matter. The whole point of widening the scope of concern is to take control of what can be controlled. So focusing on what can be done, rather than what cannot be done, is the psychologically healthy and natural approach. — apokrisis

Concerns and abilities go hand in hand. We have abilities to satisfy concerns. Most of our concerns can be relatively easily met - food, drink, shelter, community, etc. However, these abilities are not perfect either, and we often screw up. If we look objectively at how much control we have in the cosmic sense, we'll be crushed at how little we actually have - and how easily everything can be taken away from us. We're desperately trying to maintain control over our environment, and somehow we keep fucking up.

We also have a concern that no other animal seems to need: meaning. Zapffe picked up on this, so did Becker, Freud, and the other various existentialists.

Unfortunately, our need for meaning cannot be accommodated by our environment, because our environment is meaningless. So we have to make do with a pseudo-solution, such as heroism, culture, pragmatic Stoicism, religion, politics, self help books, you name it.

The point being made here is that the very fact you have to tell yourself that "it really doesn't matter" means that it actually does matter - it's not obvious, and thus it is a problem that must be fixed. You have constrained your psyche and found a suitable means of escaping the panic of meaninglessness, by pretending that it really doesn't matter. It's a second-rate pseudo-poetic solution: a tragedy.

So the life-long process of limiting the contents of human consciousness (for reassurance and comfort to avoid panic overload) is natural and "healthy"...what does that say about our state of affairs?

The pessimist can be viewed as an explorer into the furthest reaches of the human psyche, the deepest, darkest pits of consciousness, the one that brings to light what everyone else has repressed. The pessimists aren't wrong in their statements...it's just that most people don't like what they have to say.

Such thinking is based totally on hedonism, i.e. 'pleasure=good, pain=bad'. — Wayfarer

I accept this.

But from there, adopting a position of cosmic helplessness is bad analysis. If the game is wrong in your opinion, get involved in changing it. And be prepared that the thing that needs to change most is yourself - because the issues aren't cosmic at all, merely local and social. — apokrisis

Why are you assuming I'm not active? I'm extremely active. I care about suffering, and I do things to care for those who are suffering as a result. I don't know about the other pessimists here, and that's actually one major point that I diverge from the "classical" pessimists on: if you care about suffering, you won't retreat from it, you'll do something about it.

Once again.......I'm not specifically arguing a "cosmic" metaphysical principle here. The local and social issues of Life are what are problematic. So Schopenhauer and co. are likely incorrect with their metaphysics, as they try to apply a localized phenomenon to the rest of reality, when the rest of reality should be used to explain the localized phenomenon (holism). However, that does not change the fact that they were damn accurate on their analysis of the human condition - the localized phenomenon.

If you want a tentative metaphysical principle, then I'd offer mine to be that the universe evolves surrounding constraints that emerge from Scarcity and the subsequent Fatigue (or Entropy). And, as Zapffe pointed out, as we scale "up" in awareness, so do we scale up in Concerns. So the unconscious rock has no Concerns, the lizard has a few Concerns occupying its day-to-day life, and the human being has a surplus of awareness that allows him to hold a surplus of Concerns, notably that of meaning.

According to Zapffe, the utter lack of meaning, means that we have to find ways to deal with this void of Concern. So we isolate, distract, attach, or sublimate ourselves to avoid panic. Suicide, then, is a natural death from spiritual causes.

Do you think chimps and dolphins feel pessimism? Is that an abstraction that might rule their waking lives? — apokrisis

No, but I think they can suffer, and that's what matters.

Your foundational view of reality is that existence must be based on some solid ground of some kind - something that is the opposite of the dynamism or contingency we see in the world itself. — apokrisis

This isn't this kind of debate apo. I'm saying that the structure of life as we know it has components that nevertheless make the organism suffer. I don't need to postulate that suffering is some grand metaphysical scheme to argue that suffering is a necessary component of organic existence.

That's just rubbish. I've already said that panglossian optimism is just as fake as your universalised pessimism.

Equanimity is a natural goal because the balancing of dynamics is the only real way for existence to achieve stability and solidity of any kind.

So your response here - to protest against being expected to contribute to your own balancing by claiming cosmic helplessness - is childish. Except even children don't believe they are actually helpless. — apokrisis

Except it's not childish, since the balancing act requires the human organism to artificial limit the contents of their consciousness to avoid panic. It's certainly "possible" to achieve a certain stability (although death is the ultimate achievement of stability), it's just that this is quite difficult to do and doesn't come naturally.

Nice ad hominem, I continue to wonder why those opposed to pessimism get all bent out of shape if pessimism really is as silly as they claim.

As usual, one doesn't claim to "know things" in some sceptic-proof absolute way. One simply has made the pragmatic effort to minimise one's uncertainty about a claim. So yes, comparative psychology, and even the neuropsychology of pain responses, is something that has been closely studied. — apokrisis

And given these studies we can come to realize that animals are much closer to us behaviorally than we might have expected.

This entire discussion reminds of the hydrostatic equilibrium of a star - expanding and contracting over and over again until running out of fuel or exploding in a supernova.

There is of course the third option of whatever lies inbetween. So it is quite wrong to construct a philosophy around a forced binary view when the reality is that most of existence is meant to be lived as a balance between two bounding extremes.

Your approach is flawed at its root. — apokrisis

If it's flawed, then what is this third option (other than unconsciousness, whether that be by sleep, or by unintentional/intentional death?)

Pessimism is thus just a symptom - the flipside of optimism. And both are essentially equally meaningless in a naturalistic context. Or at least, they should rightfully be passing psychological states if the long-term state of adaptedness ought to be one zeroed on smooth stoic equanimity.

If pessimism or optimism becomes a fixed state of mind, that tells of a mind that is no longer really thinking (and finding the path that points back to an even state of balance). — apokrisis

Again, there's a difference between psychological and philosophical pessimism.

Stoic equanimity works well in the classroom and the textbook. Out in the real world, not so much. The fact that we have to limit (balance) ourselves means there is a problem that must be resolved. The fact that we even have to have a debate over this means that there is something wrong - and if it's the psychology of the pessimists, then we merely have to realize that the pessimist is merely a manifestation of the world. We would come to realize that the universe is capable to inflicting harmful delusions upon its manifestations - if the pessimist, in all his horrifying existential theories, is actually wrong, then why is the pessimist even able to have these horrifying existential theories to begin with? Essentially, pessimism is an argument for pessimism.

Equanimity is artificial, contrived. It's forced into existence and held into existence by the sheer will of the psyche - I will be virtuous, I will not descend into panic, I will kick all my miseries under the rug and pretend everything is fine and ignore everyone else's tragedy, etc.

There is some truth in this, but look at how you keep needing to mention the "we" who fail to be in control. You take it for granted there is the "self" who is at the helpless centre of things, when psychology tells us such individuated being is a social construct. Animals just don't have the same ideas about life and so don't bewail the limits and efforts of being "a self" in the way you claim is so natural. — apokrisis

How do you know what ideas animals have? From a harm-based perspective, we ought to assume that behaviorally-similar organisms possess similar psychological facilities.

Furthermore, the "self" being a social construct doesn't change the fact that it's keenly present in our everyday experiences.

To everyone here: let's face the facts: there's two aspects of human existence: suffering and fun. If you're having a lot of fun, you usually don't care too much about suffering. And if you're suffering, you usually don't care too much for fun.

The point about pessimism is that suffering comes naturally. We don't control our bodies, we don't control our environment, we don't control our desires as much as we wish we did. The prevention of pain by the satisfaction of concerns is the primary purpose of human existence. Whereas fun requires effort and does not come naturally. Suffering is a structural aspect of life, fun is an accidental aspect of life.

"The richest experience that a tragedy can give is a pseudo-solution of the metaphysical problem of meaning through poetic sublimation"

- Peter Zapffe, On the Tragic

Modern life is one long struggle against boredom. — Thorongil

Just modern life, or the lives of those who don't have anything better to do?

Boredom pales in comparison to physical pain. Boredom is what made art, philosophy, sciences etc all possible. We've always struggled against boredom, it's just that today we're less and less able to find that psychological "flow" when we're forced into cubicles.

So modern life can be characterized as a bland persistence of laziness and servitude to our sensual desires, without the required energy to sublimate ourselves into the aesthetic. It's easy to stave off the boredom but it's ultimately ineffective because it's not aesthetic in nature. There's no effort required to be entertained.

Ah, is that it.

I think for the most part the internet as it is currently operating as is just another manifestation of humanity's propensity for stupidity. Or, to be more precise, it's just one more way humanity has turned something that has the potential for a lot of good into a device for a lot of silliness.

I wouldn't go as far as to say the internet is evil or a bad influence on society per se, just that it's a technological marvel that isn't being used to its full potential. To those who say we spend too much time on the internet, I'd reply that had we not had the internet we would have just been doing something else as a time sink.

As a way of communicating ideas and information, the internet has been an unrivaled success.

I'm unsympathetic to the appeal to a return to real-world interaction because I think disillusionment of this kind is a one-way street and that once human interaction is seen as trivial you can't reverse seeing that. There is nothing 'real' about what goes on in the real world. — The Great Whatever

The grass is always greener on the other side.

And I'd rather not, and in fact, my plan for the future is to be independent and financially stable enough so that I can drop kick this stupid machine out the window. At the moment, however, I have to use my computer and the Internet. — Thorongil

My point was that you're currently using the internet to contribute to a philosophy forum, a forum that I suspect you do not have to use.

I would rather a world without all this technology, to be honest. A world perhaps not too dissimilar to the Dark Ages. — Thorongil

I mean... you don't have to use the internet...

Technology has been and is the best way of improving the quality of life for human beings.

Had you lived in the Dark Ages, you would either have been (likely unimportant) priest or a serf/peasant on the estate of your lord, tilling the land, or maybe a liege knight of a petty king. You apparently had more free time back then, but then again there wasn't much to do, education was little to none (so much was lost in the sacking of Rome and the burning of Alexandria), income was little to none, life expectancy was mid forties to fifties, medicine was herbal and inefficient, pain killer was practically non-existent (alcohol was the only real one known), sanitation was quite relaxed in comparison to today (especially in cities and castles), and depending on where and when you lived you had to deal with the very real threat of invasion, or being conscripted (since you are a male), or dying in childbirth (if you're female), or plagues, not to mention the general superstition and irrational thinking that you of all people would have abhorred. Even the Catholic Church was filled with superstitious priests (it was a religion after all), corrupt higher-ups, and only a select few actually knew how to read and write and even less did philosophy. You're chances of being an Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, or the Medieval Schopenhauer would be negligible.

All in all the Dark Ages would not have been like an extended camping trip in the wilderness. So many people fail as ascetics, or just hermits, because they aren't able to let go of all the comforts of modern life. There's a lot of trouble that comes along with these comforts, but I think it would quite decadent to say that these technological comforts are bad when you're currently benefiting from them.

This is one of the reasons why nominalism is so tedious and in all likelihood incorrect. Our language does not determine the identity of objects, the constitution of objects determine their identities, which our language describes in various ways. Languages can change all the time without the objects of predication changing.

I happen to be a composition-as-identity theorist, so whatever Pluto is, I see as dependent on every single part of whatever is seen as Pluto. A single change, changes the identity of Pluto from Pluto1.0 to Pluto1.1, for example. In fact I'm not even sure if I'm committed to objects in reality; I'm leaning towards conceptualist anti-realism or mereological nihilism.

So, I think much of the common understanding and symbolism which has accrued around the notions of karma and reincarnation may become a lure towards an unhealthy preoccupation with personal salvation, at least for modern Western aspirants. — John

It's definitely a Western thing, since afaik re-birth in Buddhism is more akin to the passing of a flame from one candle to the next. You obtain enlightenment not only for yourself but also for other people.

I believe it is important to recognize that Aquinas approached Aristotelian metaphysics from a firm Neo-Platonist foundation. Therefore his work was to interpret Aristotle in a way so as to establish consistency with Neo-Platonist principles. This involved selective referencing, and generally shaping the material to conform. I think that if an inverse situation had occurred, if one were to approach Neo-Platonic metaphysics from a stringent Aristotelian platform, such a consistency could not have been established. . — Metaphysician Undercover

So, like I was saying, Aquinas rather "bastardized" Aristotelianism. That's not to say that what he did was remarkable, but he certainly had an agenda to fulfill, it would seem.

They were free to think within the confines of Scripture. Like Whitehead said: Christianity is a religion looking for a metaphysics (...while Buddhism is a metaphysics looking for a religion).

I might be wrong but I think Schop1 meant that Augustine (and Aquinas) limited themselves somewhat by adhering to Christianity. Whereas people like Plotinus didn't have to do that and in fact criticized the religions of their day.

Like I said, the Church was playing its cards.

Thank you, I hadn't heard of Kenny, although apparently Feser responds to his critiques. I'll have to read the original documents some time though.

Any recommendations for alternative theologies, such as Augustine?

But the point about that school is, it is about the last remaining outpost of the perennial tradition that is still alive in Western culture. — Wayfarer

What do you consider to be the "perennial" tradition?

although I don't share his Catholic convictions. — Wayfarer

May I ask why you do not? This would make you, at minimum, opposed to his theology.

This is the problem with Peirce. He puts all possible self-orgainsation into the principle of our minds, as if we new everything about the world by knowing a few general principles. Rather than putting models and meaning in the world, giving each state of the world its specific meaning which we might or might not know, he insists what we know must be the extent of the world. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind?

It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective, unknowable noumenon "just to say they're realists". It's as if it's just slapped in their in order to avoid being called a full-fledged idealist.

Existence does that. — TheWillowOfDarkness

How does existence do this? By power ontology, teleology, tychism, etc?

I can't say I enjoy these debates when this tone arrives in them. I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. — mcdoodle

(Y) I cannot and will not stand arguments. I enjoy discussion, not flame wars.