Existentialism

haha ts: polo-neck vs polo-nius

better list of books.
http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/sources.shtml

you might get a better response on i love books than here - here they're too busy talking about fifa world cup sticker books.

i didn't get any further than 'l'etranger' and 'catcher in the rye' but am generally pro-existentialism. or 'gloomy' as my friends would say. well, i say friends...

http://users.skynet.be/sisyphe/images/acamus.jpg

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Also see Heidegger's Being and Time. Not sure any of the so called existentialists really had much to add rather than a bit watered down version of early Heidegger.

Existentialism is really from Germany but where the Germans said, "There is no God. Life is without meaning. We can build concentration camps." the French say "There is no God. Life is without meaning. We can get stoned and have orgies."

I also recommend reading Kierkegaard

Didn't know where to put this, either here or in the Cioran thread I suppose? It's far more a case of 'non-existentialism' instead of this thread, but: The Case for Not Being Born. On anti-natalism.

And the Nobel.prize for philosophy as a thinly veiled expression of personal psychological hang-ups goes to...

mark this one down as "stunt philosophy" imo

At least he's dealing with one of the most fundamental issues...He subtitles his book 'the harm of coming into existence', but I'm curious if his issue is with more with self-consciousness; that our problem is that we are aware that we suffer. If we didn't have self-consciousness, would existence be so 'harmful'? per se?

Performance philosophy

misanthropy is so bourgie

Remind me again is that a bad thing

Good thing if doubled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYraHYFIJU

xp

ah what's good and bad? it's a boring thing, it's a solipsist's thing.

you hate yourself, fine, that seems like a familiar enough human experience, a lot of us play back and forward with it.

you hate the undifferentiated mass of everybody well ok then, clear off, you know where the door is. it's like you want your misery to be so grand and visible that you're happy to crush everybody else for it. like an aristocrat walled up in yr castle so bored that you snipe the peasants for jollies.

even when other people are driving me nuts I know it's mostly just me.

I find many parts of that interview quietly hilarious

this guy doesn't hate himself as some object, or people in general, just the experience of being alive. i don't think it's right to personalise and even medicalise any thoughts along these lines, just ascribe them to a satyr imo

He chose to monetize it instead

a knock out blow there

He's a professional philosopher.

seems like a guy who is really close to re-discovering Buddhism just with a bullshit theoretical tilt to it.

he seems to be arguing a point from some imaginary place in a nonsense utopia where mankind can come together unanimously to do this one thing they should do because they can't come together. honestly if you can convince the rest of the human race to stop having sex then you can probably eliminate a lot of that suffering.

You guys have heard of philosophy before right, this is what it’s usually like

Anyway I want to read “better to never have been” at some point at risk of wasting my time because I agree with all of it before I read it

Imaginary places in nonsense utopias are the point of view of a lot of philosophy, that is the game

You guys have heard of philosophy before right

― .oO (silby), Thursday, November 30, 2017 8:37 AM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

never heard of 'im

sounds like bullshit theory

In philosophy you have to work harder than just saying 'sounds like bullshit theory' if you want to engage.

Funnily enough I've been making my way through De Beauvoir's memoirs and her take on it as something live, to live in the world with, is light years from that piece (I've only read the headline and I'll probably keep it that way).

A lot of the ppl under the existentialist banner were either communists or very left-wing in their politics, and that which was something to be practiced and fought for - so its not a game to them.

xp you also need to know the texts ppl are in dialogue with if you want to understand intent

you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.

i dunno ive certainly felt like this from time to time

To engage on its own terms, this bit is problematic:

compare that with scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.” This asymmetry “completely stacks the deck against existence,” 

I don't buy the asymmetry. If there's nobody to be deprived of the good things then there's nobody to suffer the bad things either. Care about non-existing people and their pains and pleasures or don't, but i don't see how you can split it that way.

that quote jim posted is like 3rd rate schopenhauer thot

havent read the article tho

it's aristotle

If there's nobody to be deprived of the good things then there's nobody to suffer the bad things either.

yeah. good philosophers don't get distracted by shiny paradoxes that dissolve under a cursory examination of their logic.

xp

makes sense

kinda feel bad we just lol at the ancient greeks in modern day philo class

I think the wiki chart makes his asymmetry argument clearer:

Scenario A (X exists) Scenario B (X never exists)
(1) Presence of pain (Bad) (3) Absence of pain (Good)
(2) Presence of pleasure (Good) (4) Absence of pleasure (Not bad)

haven’t read the article but the better to never have existed argument is quite common in the spheres of (a) animal rights when your talking about farmed animals that are mostly deliberately brought into the world by humans for exploitation and profit (I agree with the argument in that instance tbh), and (b) people talking about the termination of pregnancies where the child is likely to have severe disabilities or a life limiting illness (this is a fucking minefield obviously)

well, maybe not - with that formatting

yeah still don't buy it. absence of pleasure? sounds kinda bad to me.

i mean as a committed moral error theorist i think he's welcome to his opinions.

That schema conceals a flaw, in that it does not truly compare the hypothetical under examination, which is: Absence of Everything versus Presence of Something, where the presence of something includes experiences of unknown qualities and of unknown durations but which can be assumed to include both pleasure and pain in unknown amounts, but absence excludes the possibility of anything at all. It also sidesteps the impossibility of goodness in absence, because goodness requires the presence of something.

So, to expand a bit further, an unstated, but implicit, argument in that wiki schema is that Pain, Pleasure, Good, and Bad are all absolutes. I say this because it does not admit any variability in their painfulness, pleasurableness, badness or goodness, either through depth or duration. They exist in that chart as whole, indivisible entities. This is an oversimplification of astounding magnitude.