/lit/ - Literature

>>17511038
>>17511089
>>17511137
>First, a pessimist straw man is built. The pessimist would be characterized by the following traits: he is deeply unhappy, hates himself and existence (p. 2), seems especially grumpy and incapable of any joy, is a desperate person (6), who adores the negative, death and everything that is connected with non-existence, that “makes nothingness positive” and turns it into a kind of divinity (21), which has his pessimistic attitude by personal problems to insert himself in life, among the happy people; an annoying bastard and killjoy, somewhat crazy (and possibly homosexual, especially if he speaks ill of procreation and fatherhood)...

Still within this first straw man strategy, it is curious that when an optimistic philosopher claims to have discovered something (for example, freedom, dignity of the human person, the eternal in man, etc.), it is considered that he has discovered something for humanity; but when the pessimist discovers something unpleasant (perverse infantile sexuality, mortality, structural pain), what he discovered_is valid only for him_ and not for humanity. Ever since I began to write on these issues, objections have almost always gone in this direction: “Pessimism is a personal, subjective and non-universalizable posture; you are like that, those are your personal characteristics and of many people as sick as you”; but I never hear any criticism of “subjectivity” when the results are beautiful. (Of course, this and other outrageous asymmetries are allowed to the optimist who, as MV says cheerfully, accepts reason only when it is convenient, but reserves the right to reject it when it is not).