Philosophers in Rags :: We dive deeper, and come up muddier.

On second thought, since I have no way of knowing what this young man was feeling before and when he hung himself, I have no right to categorize this act as pathetic.  I do think it is a shame that he was so tormented over frustrated desires for material posessions.

This creation should have never taken place.

And yet, it did, and, therein lies the rub, as they say.  I once learned when exposed to the "Rational Emotive" theories of Albert Ellis that it is best for our mental well-being not to use words such as should or ought or must.  And yet, maybe you are right to make such a statement, that the creation should have never taken place.


The point is, though, that it has taken place, whether it was an irrational accident with no purpose whatsoever, or whether it was a fantastically wicked miracle.

We face the thing that should not be.  I suppose it takes great emotional maturity to nurture some respect for all that exists knowing how genuinely unpleasant it really is to be alive.

I once saw a news report where a woman employee at an aquarium was killed by a whale while kissing it on the head.  That kiss must have irritated the hell out of the beast, for he did not consume her flesh.  He was not hungry.   He was enraged by her lack of respect for just how dangerous an animal he was.

Maybe instead of hating and resenting my fellow human beings so much, I might cultivate more respect for their wretched condition, their true subjective misery.

I have no regrets about thinking "too deep" as such thinking often helps me even feel less anxious about my own irritability.  It's a heavy burden just to exist, and I understand why you often wish the world had never been created.


As the old Queen song says, "I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all!"


I'm sure everyone must feel this way from time to time, especially those who feel they are living a nightmare.



I know that I happen to be somewhat stable with a roof over my head and a library of books to study, but were I stranded on a curb with no place to call home, I surely would be in a frustrating position, not wanting to go on living, but unable to shut off the will to live.


Whatever it is we are caught up in, there does not seem to be any easy way out.   All you can do is take a deep breath or else end up hanging at the end of a rope, which is a big decision more and more people are making.   The statistics are hard to wrap our minds around.   It is said that every 30 minutes a farmer in India takes his own life.   I am not sure what the statistics are with student suicides, but that rate is shockingly high as well.


Here in New Jersey, suicide is one of the leading causes of death.  Schopenhauer's father, my Dad's grandfather, my brother-in-laws brother, Holden's cousin.   A couple years ago I ran into an x-girlfriend's mother.  She informed me that her son had shot himself in the heart.  He was a great artist. 

I do not judge anyone since I suppose living can become unbearable.

One thing I have agreed upon with Albert Camus is the centrality of the topic of suicide to any serious philosophy.

We joke around about the Schopenhauer Suicide Hotline.  We joke around about it because it is all so very deadly serious.  Maybe joking around about how unpleasant the burden of our own existence is does help us endure it in a peculiar way.  We do not have to try so hard to understand anything.  We don't need to "succeed" in terms of our society's warped standards and metrics.

We are alive and deal with day to day living.  I think it is actually healthy to consider that we always have the option to end it all, although, as I said, this is not an easy choice.  I'm for sticking around, getting through the night, and maybe becoming enthusiastic about some kind of project to occupy my mind.

I cannot say what tomorrow will bring or how I will respond to unexpected heartache and living problems.

You say the creation should never have taken place, and you have a right to utter such a forbidden statement; but as I said, the creation has taken place, and here we are feeling like passengers in our own animal bodies.  Consider the sadness which exists in countless hearts this very moment.  Is this sadness not what binds us all together, this empathy for what it is like to exist as an animal creature?   

And yet, we become "hard".  We become cynical, paranoid, anxious, alienated, and we may begin to brood, sulk, letting our ill will fester.

The biography Michel Houellebecq wrote about HP Lovecraft is called "H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life"

That title fascinates me.

He explores Lovecraft's profound hatred of life and philosophical denial of the real world.

He notes the recurring image in Lovecraft's fiction of a mammoth, hideous city teeming with terrifying beings.  Holden attests that Calcutta is no different than New York City in that respect.

Houellebecq notes that his works include "not a single allusion to two of the realities to which we generally ascribe great importance: sex and money."

While I have only read a handful of Lovercraft's tales, I immediately recognized that I myself am the very type of character one mind find in one of his unwritten stories.  My obsession with math, and the way I engage with particular specific old textbooks as though they hold some kind of mysterious secret which other more mainstream texts are missing, this trait alienates me from the normal and the popular.

Albert Ellis would tell you that you should not use the word should.  He would presume to have some kind of formula to help you feel less miserable.  I would not do such a thing.  In fact, I think that you show courage in facing the unpleasant brute fact that you probably hate life as much as HP Lovecraft did.  You witness that so much of society is grounded in sex and money.

Lovecraft "believed that life is ultimately incomprehensible to human beings and the universe is a cold, hostile place."

I have felt this repeatedly throughout my life. 

Maybe all I am trying to say is that, we seem to live in an age where the Thought Police are constantly trying to control what people say, or even to control what people allow themselves to think.

We are not supposed to hate life.  We are not supposed to hate the Creation.  We are not supposed to hate other people or even fear other people - but it is ok to hate and fear insects, reptiles, and, of course, "The Enemy," whoever the enemy happens to be.

And yet, what if someone sincerely does hate life?  What if someone is sincerely terrified of other people which instills in them a definite hatred and mistrust?

I would sure not want to be a writer in today's world of political correctness. 

Forgive me for rambling.  I was struck by the directness of your statement that the creation should never have happened.


May some crazy animal make you laugh tomorrow, maybe a crazy squirrel or something.  Don't worry too much about your dark views, Raul.  There has to be some morbid humor in it somewhere.  I really believe that.  I mean, while bright and cheerful characters can be annoying, there is something genuine, sincere, and authentic about someone who just comes right out with how they really feel about life in general.


I am glad to have made your acquaintance.


I hope you are holding up alright caring for you father.  I suppose you have many mixed feelings at this time.  My parents are at an age where I reflect upon mortality often.

Take care and try to rest while sleeping.  My grandmother used to tell me that it is ok just to lay in the dark even if you can't sleep.  I say, let the creation do your breathing for you.  It brought you into this, and it will bring you out.  This is all very temporary, over in a flash.  Just enough time for a quick joke and then we're gone forever.   Even the earth and sun will one day be no more.  The mountains will fall into the sea.


If we observe our own animal bodies closely each day, we begin to notice that we put a good amount of effort into trying NOT TO DIE.  Isn't it ironic that many of us, even while we are aware of such efforts to not die, believe that on some level we in fact wish we had never been born in the first place?   For, had we never been born, we would not be in this predicament of trying not to die!


Is it all some kind of cosmic joke? 

Hentrich,

I think you are worthy of being called a good human being. A title I do not deserve.

It is difficult to cultivate respect for our fellow human beings, their and our wretched human condition, our and their true subjective misery, as you say. It is difficult to grow in an environment where you are just seen as a cannon fodder, a disposable container of flesh and bones, just good enough to pay taxes and fight wars, etc. That is what those who see you as a con-artist fail to comprehend. They see you, Holden, and others as losers or bitter men. They fail to comprehend that the so-called pleasures of this world of suffering are not worth anything.  He who laughs last, laughs best.

Well, they will never comprehend.

Suffering and sorrows are man´s best friend. Last night my sister and I went to the funeral of an old man who was in the same room as my father. He was taken to another room for his neumonia and urinary infections. He did not make it and passed away yesterday morning after 23 days in the hospital. I did not want to attend the funeral because I do not find funerals appealing.  I do not think I will have a proper funeral and it does not really matter.  The worms will do their job. A Catholic priest came to the casket where the man was placed and prayed the ten mysteries.  I only heard seven and then I left and waited for my sister and pay my respects to the old man´s daughters. The mysteries are only for those who will wait their own departure from this world.



Take care.

In a dream early this morning I was a body among bodies.  We were still alive but aware of becoming skeletons.  No matter what the color of our skin, the structure of our bones, or whether or not we had reproduced, the bodies we associate with our identity were destined to very soon become skeletons.

When I rise in the morning I try to remain focused on what it was I was studying last night.  I try to pick up where consciousness left off.   Death and other unexpected turns of events can easily disrupt my plans.

The authors of these textbooks may have underestimated the attitudes of potential readers of the material, attitudes reflected in the question, "Why bother?"

Raul,

You say I am a good man and that you do not consider yourself to be a good man.

When I am hungry, I eat.  I would become a nasty animal were someone to deny me the food on my plate.  We human animals are such vulnerable creatures filled with fear of life, fear of the world, just so totally overwhelmed with fear (of death, homelessness, and even vanity over the opinions of others.)

If we are pathetic creatures, it is through no fault of our own, but we are pathetic by design.

Hence, even if there were an actual Designer called God, we would be justified in hating Him.   We are not the ones who should be judged on the mythical Judgment Day.  No, it is the supposed Creator who ought to be judged by all we vulnerable creatures condemned to exist only to decay into nothing, as though we had never been at all.

The creature has the power to destroy the entire creation simply by ending its own life.

With this in mind, even as we are embedded in these animal bodies, even as we are tormented by our own vulnerability existing as these fragile naked ape-like hominids, dependent upon grocery stores, farms, food, shelter, etc, even as we are basically humiliated by the entire process of being living creatures born only to die, we are free to be unhappy about our condition.

I think, maybe incorrectly, that our ability to articulate our displeasure with our predicament gives us a little more dignity than were we to grovel and "sing praises to the Lord for the miracle of birth into this slop."

I would like us to reach a point on this message board where we can log on just to state something as basic as, "I am terrified."
 
May we be courageous enough to face the unpleasantness of our general vulnerability.

Let's be honest about our condition and not pull any punches.  It suucks to be a human animal.  It's not a fuucking miracle, but more of an imposition.  I used to pity the rest of the Creation for being polluted by mankind's technological innovations; but then part of me became cynical and mean-spirited, thinking, "That's what Nature gets for creating such a vulnerable species!  Of course mankind as a whole is terrified with its predicament, hungry all the time, and now the species faces extinction due to its success with industrialized agriculture.

I study math and admit I am just another pathetic and terrified human animal; but I refuse to be swindled into thinking I am some kind of defective, chemically imbalanced freak.  No, I am mankind itself.   I am our tired and exhausted species who wants to just smoke tobacco until it can no longer breathe.   Will this brain live long enough to explore "computational physics"?   

What difference does it make?

Am I to believe that possessing an understanding of trigonometric functions and the methods of calculus will transform me into anything other than what I am already? 

Does someone who considers themselves to be a physicist cease to be this pathetic human animal?

No, but the discipline required to explore such a subject leaves me awestruck.

I spend a lifetime just studying the language of physics, which is mathematics, the Queen and servant of science, and yet it still feels like I am in a science-fiction film since no one in my day to day monkey sphere takes any interest in such things as "Trigo-nAHmo-what?"

As I alluded to in "The Tyranny of Public Opinion," if you develop an interest in "intellectual matters" at a young age, after receiving so many blows to the face and body by knuckle-dragging gorillas, and even after being handled roughly by apes with guns and badges one too many times, you really do become a very bitter creature, like a dog whose been beat too much ...  You can't help but have contempt for the courts, the judges, lawyers, and aSS-licking clerks.  You can't help but become damaged product, and maybe even become a "worker horse put out to pasture" for its refusal to feign interest in serving any master.

So, I wonder how these professors in the universities managed to maneuver themselves into these positions in the hierarchy of the intellectual elite.  I can't help but see myself as a wolf in a society of dogs, or some kind of mutation who simply does not fit into the society, neither as a laborer, nor as a technician, nor as an intellectual ...

... and so I revisit the trigonometry from a period in history where the mathematicians were writing the textbooks for high school students.

I have nothing better to do.  I just can't bring myself to play the role of chimpanzee mopping floor anymore.  I might be more likely to tip the garbage can over, and then I would have to be sedated and dragged to a punitive zone of the zoo/plantation.

Be patient with your father.  You are perfectly sane for feeling as though you are living in a nightmare.

Take care, and don't be afraid to groan.  Let your animal body speak its own language of grunts and groans.   

[SIGH]

From A Book of Nonsense:

I study as an end in itself, for the sheer pleasure of learning and discovering and deepening my understanding, whereas a professional studies as a means to an end, the end usually being social status and money.

In an essay called On Men of Learning, Schopenhauer writes something that reminds me of the Swift quote at the start of Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (You will recognize a genius by the fact that there will be a confederacy of dunces against him):

“In the republic of letters it is as in other republics; favor is shown to the plain man – he who goes his way in silence and who does not set up to be cleverer than others.  But the abnormal man is looked upon as threatening danger; people band together against him, and have, oh! such a majority on their side.”

“The condition of this republic is much like that of a small State in America, where every man is intent only upon his own advantage, and seeks reputation and power for himself, quite heedless of the general weal, which then goes to ruin.  So it is in the republic of letters; it is himself and himself alone, that a man puts forward, because he wants to gain fame.  The only thing in which all agree is in trying to keep down a really eminent man, if he should chance to show himself, as one who would be a common peril.  From this it is easy to see how it fares with knowledge as a whole.”

"Between professors and independent men of learning there has always been from of old a certain antagonism, which may perhaps be likened to that existing between dogs and wolves."

Here I witness where Nietzsche got his saying, “ … hated by the people as the wolf is hated by the dogs.”

"Meaning of Life: Peter Wessel Zapffe on the Human Condition" in Beatrix Himmelmann (ed.) On Meaning in Life, Berlin: de Gruyter 2013, pp. 113-128

Have any of you had a chance to read the above essays? Thoughts?

"As a matter of fact, we all carry the seed of metaphysical or religious defeat within us."

"A human is a being that demands meaning in a meaningless world."

"An uninhabited planet is no misfortune."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo

His thoughts on the Crucified Christ figure (begins at 22:22 in "The Humorous Pessimist") are damning for humanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmpYC5U930Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-HSmgMq4ek

Hentrich,

What you write is very sad. You have been going through very difficult circumnstances there.

I can only hope you have a little tranquility. if that is possible, where you are now.

Stay safe.

Silenus,

I hope you are doing fine wherever you are in the big USA.

Take care.