/lit/ - Literature

>>19034654
>t. skimmed wikipedia

> that non-existence is infinitely preferable to existence
I'll never get this. It always feels like depressive neurotics trying to eloquently argue for their negativist bias.

>>19034657
Read every single thing he’s written. I understand why he doesn’t advocate suicide and I think his reasoning is impotent. When considering suicide, one wishes not to end willing itself, but the individual phenomenon one currently inhabits. The goal of suicide is escaping one’s current objectification of the will, one’s current body. Whether will itself is eternal plays no role in one’s decision here.

>>19034657
(Same guy) Seriously, has Schopenhauers philosophy ever birthed one of these ‘graceful saints’ he speaks of in the 4th book? I’d wager the proportion of inspired suicides to bettered lives is about 100:1. Schopenhauer’s is a profoundly life-denying philosophy who’s only tenable conclusion has to be suicide, as Mainländer posits.

>>19034680
>but the individual phenomenon one currently inhabits. The goal of suicide is escaping one’s current objectification of the will, one’s current body.
Is this implying reincarnation?

>>19034670
>It always feels like depressive neurotics trying to eloquently argue for their negativist bias.

t. someone with optimism bias

>>19034755
Sort of. Everything in representation, so everything mediated by the principles of individuation (space, time, causality or Matter) must necessarily derive from will, which includes one’s own being (one’s individuality) as much as it includes one’s own world. You, me, your dog, your plant, your backyard and all the natural forces acting on them, are merely a transient expressions, different “gradations of the will”, with gravity being the lowest and man being the highest, the only form of life with a faculty of reason. Schop thinks that when we die, the representation ceases to exists inasmuch as our own cognition thereof does, but the will that we embody lives on. That’s it. Our human self, that illusion we are all mortally attached to, is destroyed. But that is exactly the chief aim of suicide, to end one’s miserable HUMAN existence. Schopenhauer dove straight into advocating suicide, his “just become Jesus Christ bro” parachute malfunctioned. At least for me.

>>19034695
Schopenhauer's philosophy explains things, not recommends them. You would have knows this have you actually read his as (You) claim.

>>19034680
>>19034831
Schopenhauer please help me by answering these question. It's causing me great pain

Why I was born?

Schopenhauer says that I was always I and I will remain an I but my concern is the emergence of my wretched subjectivity, the individual Self from a unifying I. What caused this breach from the unity of life and kicked me into time? Where was I in all of those years before my birth? Doesn't my being applies that I could born again if I was born this time?

>>19034654
he says it is fine if you kill yourself. read 'on suicide'. the catch is you can't just shoot yourself in the head, you need to starve yourself to death.

>>19035432
>the catch is you can't just shoot yourself in the head, you need to starve yourself to death.
He never said that

>>19035454
he did, i just read it the other day

>>19035465
Post full quote

>>19035454
The concept of death is of special importance in Schopenhauer's metaphysics of appearance and Will. Death for Schopenhauer is the aim and purpose of life, that toward which life is directed, and the denial of the individual will to life. Despite his profound pessimism, Schopenhauer vehemently rejects suicide as an unworthy affirmation of the will to life by those who seek to escape rather than seek nondiscursive knowledge of Will in suffering. The only manner of self-destruction Schopenhauer finds philosophically acceptable is the ascetic saint's death by starvation. Here the individual will to life is so completely mastered as to refuse even the most basic desire for nourishment, and thereby passes into nonexistence in complete renunciation of the individual will. Schopenhauer's attitude toward suicide nevertheless embodies an inconsistency. If, as Schopenhauer believes, the aim of life is death, and death is an unreal aspect of the world as appearance, then there appears to be no justification why the philosopher should not rush headlong into it - not to affirm the will to life in an abject effort to avoid suffering, but in order to fulfill life's purpose by ending it for distinctly philosophical reasons immediately upon arriving at an understanding of the appearance-reality distinction.

>>19035479
Not the other guy, but I remember this passage too. I'll see if I can find the original

>>19035479
Far from stemming from the will to life, in this kind of suicide an ascetic of this
type stops living simply because he has stopped willing altogether.
(WWR I, §69, 428)

>>19034670
>I'll never get this. It always feels like depressive neurotics trying to eloquently argue for their negativist bias.
because it is

>>19034828
>t. someone with optimism bias
You don't need to be an optimist to be a realist.

>>19035405
The will is the underlying force that animates all 'I's, we are all just personifications of the same will parceled out into different flesh envelopes. You simply, as a biological creature who's memories are stored in the brain, are incapable of remembering the former manifestations of the will that your species, that is the ideal human to which all humans approximate, made itself manifest in.

>>19035498
This anon's right though; Schopenhauer's rejection of suicide is stupid and inconsistent with his greater world-view. IMO he simply couldn't stomach advocating for suicide without doing it; quite a different prospect to be a hypocrite over asceticism than suicide.

>>19035498
Thank you for explaining. I think Ligotti said that Schopenhauer had to shy away from the conclusion of his philosophy to maintain his respect in the sacred halls of philosophy. But Philipp Mainländer took it to its extreme end and this is why Nietzsche immediately read Mainländer's book after it got published and then marked his separation from Schopenhauer.

>>19035520
How one can stop willing when all is Will?

>>19035534
If you can't prove a metaphysical universe that is good, then your only recourse is to pure hedonism; which, in this world, is quite impossible, given that the sum of pains outweighs that of pleasures. Once you've summed that up, the only option is to gauge your personal capacity for suicide: whether the cost of exit, the fear of exit, is a surmountable goal.

>>19035549
This doesn't explain why do my self emerged by breaching the unity of life and into time? Like how? Why?

>>19035534
>You don't need to be an optimist to be a realist.
So many layers of ideology...

>>19035573
One can't; one can diminish the will by attempting to starve it. Just as one should avoid harming other living things as much as possible.

>>19035432
>>19035563
If you kill yourself the will remains active. Personal identity becomes irrelevant in the face of Schopenhauer's nondualism. The will is one, so the pain of everyone is your pain too. By killing yourself, you will not eliminate your suffering. You have removed one manifestation of the will, that is, another piece of the "illusion", but the real thing is still active. You won't experience any repose or void. It will still be constant striving.

>>19035563
we all know why. he misleads people into thinking his philosophy is something profound and significant when in reality it's just verbose suicidal depression.
no healthy, successful man would ever see his conclusions as sensible.

>>19035588
Ah, okay so start to recognize with the underlying I and throw away your cloak of individual self.

But doesn't that underlying I is the reason behind all of the suffering in this world then why should someone be eager to unit with it? Matter prays on matter, right? So can we really ever stop being part of harming or evil?

>>19035584
The will is outside space and time, inside the noumena. Why were you born? Simple mechanical determinism: the moment the universe 'started' however that came about, you were inevitable. The will, not conditioned by causality, infects and controls the causally determined bodies of living things that arise from conception.

>>19035594
Mathematically killing yourself is reducing the quantity of the manifestation of the will, unless you're saying that there necessarily a set amount of will that must seep into the universe. If you reduce the things that manifest the will, then you reduce the will. Either this is true or Schopenhauer's claimed asceticism goes up in smoke too.

>>19035595
Define successful. The only success I acknowledge is happiness; how many truly happy people do you know? I know none. People in all states and statures of life have killed themselves: it's possible for anyone, all you're doing is engaging in the parochial past-time of so many: bulling the weak and downtrodden.

>>19035611
The will is not an I. It informs everything, but being outside of space/time, is incapable of having any definitive attributes that we can apply to it. We, 'throw away the self', by acknowledging that our bettering our position over others by the usual painful acts of intra-creature competition are meaningless vanity; we are all one, one will, one happiness, and thus in the end, one great suffering. Our only pursuit is to mitigate that; and not harming others is also the best way not to harm ourselves, given that the will is all.

No we cannot escape. All is evil and suffering; we must simply bear it.

It's clear as daylight not a single anon in this thread has read Schopenhauer beyond wikipedia.

>>19035633
>Mathematically killing yourself is reducing the quantity of the manifestation of the will
You can't quantify the will. It is one in everyone and everything. By killing yourself you don't change anything. The corollary follows that, if you fully redeem the will by asceticism, it must be eliminated in everyone and everything. This sounds bizarre, but this is what follows from Schopenhauer's thoughts.

>>19035595
Just remembered Schop’s father killed himself when Schop was 15 years old. Really starting to feel like the apostle of “Honest, objective philosophizing” had personal reservations over the very conclusion of his own system of thought.

T. OP

>>19035580
>given that the sum of pains outweighs that of pleasures
pain and pleasure are not extensive quantities, but intensive. The fact that most pessimist-fetichists are childs or ignorant people doesn't surprise me tho

>>19035653
I think you misunderstand Schopenhauer's position on suicide. He has an essay on it which you should read. On the one hand, he says suicide is "fine", in that it won't lead you to eternal damnation as Christians claim; on the other hand, it won't solve the fundamental problem, which is the constant striving of the will.

>>19034670

What's so hard to understand ? Non-existence doesn't involve pain in any sense, while existence involves pain of all kinds. That's why on a cold rational calculus, it's better if you don't exist. Of course this doesn't mean Schopenhauer advocates for suicide since he concludes that realizing the inherent pain existence presupposes, we have a reason to be more compassionate towards each other since we all suffer equally.

Nietzsche later will later pick up this conception of the will-to-life and make it into will-to-power, where all things' inherent goal is to gain more vitality or become a better version of themselves continously, so people should enjoy life and make the most of it, as temporary as it is.

Even Spinoza (way before Schopenhauer's time) in identifies this "will-to-life" as a fundamental principle of all things, but he says only that the nature of all things is to gain more vitality or power of action, which is obtained by knowledge of how nature works so he intervene actively into how he reacts to situations, not letting ourselves be led by passions or poor interpretations of events.

Schopenhauer's conception of will-to-life is more pessimistic (as in a blind force whose goal is only to satisfy itself and to this end human conflicts appear as well), but the essence of it is the same. The nature of humans is that they're led by will, as it is everything else and it's in every thing's nature to act towards its conservation. Promoting human cooperation and personal growth empowers us both physically and mentally (if we accept that the body and the mind influence each other). Additionally, in a society, the better of each individual is, the better off we are collectively, so that's the basis for cooperation between individuals.

>>19035639
We are all gnats to the devouring flame of your wisdom, anon.

>The will is outside space and time, inside the noumena. Why were you born? Simple mechanical determinism: the moment the universe 'started' however that came about, you were inevitable.
So does no one has a certain answer for Big Bang or whatever the fuck? This is very depressing.

>>19035633
>No we cannot escape. All is evil and suffering; we must simply bear it.
So what's the point in suicide then if we can't escape evil?

>>19035652
You can't eliminate the will lol, at best suppress it. It's literally the animating agent that controls all living things, just as the ancients used souls. The extinction of the will would require the extinction of the observing subjects, which, given Schopey's statements on the eternally persisting world, would seem unlikely: Schopey thought that all approximating to a transcendental ideal, even if we can't know why.

>>19035657
I don't know what you're saying; are you a dualist or something?

>>19035664
Are you the same anon who wrote the effort post about Wittgenstein and Truth of Silenus few days ago?

>>19035633
>Define successful. The only success I acknowledge is happiness
even by that definition, his philosophy wouldn't be worth consideration. if anything it would be more of a hindrance on a happy person's mental state than a help, since his philosophy isn't particularly helpful imo.

>>19035684

Yes, how did you realize it ? Lol.

>>19035676
It expedites the suffering by giving it less time to manifest. As I've said, this depends on Schopenhauer's unexplained views as to how persistent he believes humanity to be; either way, it contradicts his writing in one way or the other.

>>19035686
Who's happier, a pessimist eternally searching for the reason for his misery, or a pessimist who's found the 'why'? If you believe personality, and as such base happiness level, to be genetically inbuilt, then this is the only option the those poor miserable men incapable of suicide.

>>19035682
>You can't eliminate the will lol
According to Schopenhauer, you can. He talks about the abolition of the will via negating it.
>Nevertheless, this consideration is the only one that can give us lasting comfort when we have truly recognized, on the one hand, that incurable suffering and endless misery are the appearance of the will, of the world, and have seen, on the other hand, the world melting away with the abolition of the will, leaving only empty nothing before us.

>>19035686
I have to agree with you hear. To anyone interested in appropriating Schopenhauerian thought into your praxis, don’t read book 4. Skip to Nietzsche. Unless your rich and have a very comfortable, stress-free life ahead of you (like a certain poodle-owner and familial beneficiary).

>>19035684
>>19035699
Link please

>>19035722
Here*

You’re*

>>19035699
Kek, from your prose.

I was reading your posts in the achieve one hour ago and I really enjoyed them. I went into the bathroom and kept think about them and a really cool question arose in my mind which I thought I am going to ask anon after washing my hands and I remembered that the thread is archived and felt sad. And now you're here and that question has completely escaped my mind, kek.

>>19035724

I don't know how to link it to you, I don't even remember exactly when I wrote it. The OP basically asked about the implications of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, then I explained that the goal of his philosophy is actually ethical in nature, which ties or is continued by Heidegger which gives a better key of interpretation.

>>19035717
He's using poetic language to describe the triumph over the will. The will is the animating force, I repeat myself, without it there can be no observer, and to Schopenhauer, that would mean no object to observe, no anything.

>>19035703
Thank you for answering my pseud questions

>>19035739
This is the last sentence of the 4th book.
>for everyone who is still filled with the will, what remains after it is completely abolished is certainly nothing. But conversely, for those in whom the will has turned and negated itself, this world of ours which is so very real with all its suns and galaxies is – nothing.
He clearly stresses "nothing". He means the observer, the material world, everything, is irrelevant after the abolition of the will. It's an empty shell of nothing.

>>19035703
i think any pessimist is inherently unhappy given the basic factor of viewing life through a negative lens. to compare the two would be like comparing pepsi to coca cola.
the way i see it, how could anyone be happy if they see so much justification for misery?

>>19035733

Fair enough. I'm glad you enjoyed them, I never write to others about my thoughts, a lot of the times I'm not even sure if I get it right, but if what I write makes someone get a new perspective, that's enough for me.

Maybe you'll remember before this thread gets archived. I'm going through more philosophers nowadays by reading a collection which is meant to present philosophy in popular terms so everyone understands it and I'm buying it both because I never read all philosophers and to support the initiative. I already graduated bachelor+master's in philosophy, but I feel like I could have used more of my time to read philosophy, other than just fragments and surface level stuff. Now I'm trying to make up by self-learning what I didn't during my studies. In this sense, /lit/ helps me lay out the ideas of what I read and see if people agree or not with it, maybe even get new perspectives that I missed.

>>19034654
>2014-2017: browse /lit/, be miserable
>2017-2021: browse /fit/ and /biz/, get into shape and make several times my yearly wage in crypto, be happy
>2021: return to /lit/, still DAE SUICIDE? WOMEN BAD. Basically /r9k/ pretending to read books
Holy fuck man.

>>19035784

How does /biz/ help you invest in crypto ? The board looks pretty chaotic.

>>19035733
>And now you're here and that question has completely escaped my mind, kek.
This world is trully full of suffering.

>>19035759
This has literally never happened to anybody within the bounds of civilization in all of history. What might this “abolition of the will” feel like from the inside? What does “nothing” feel like? I doubt there can be such a thing. If willing is knowing and feeling is knowing, then nothing would feel like… well, nothing. But this can not be absolute nothing, as even Schopenhauer says, it is merely a relative nothing, as it’s “nothingness” is as such only in contradiction to “being”. I can’t make sense of how that relates to one’s own consciousness.

>>19035759
You've proved my point: it's the subjective appearance of the will, not the general one. There is always will in the world, even if some people can negate it—though I still maintain that Schopey is just letting his Buddhist fetishism bleed into his prose in an overly poetic manner. The will is in the subject, which then creates the representations: solipsism; which are arbitrary and fake views of the unknowable things themselves. He's merely speaking of the unreality of these fake phenomena that can only be created by the mediation of the will-in-the-self.

>>19035776
What did you learn in the course of your degree(s)? What did the curriculum look like?

>>19035798
>How does /biz/ help you invest in crypto ?
It didn't, he just rode a lucky wave.

>>19035798
Stay there for a while, learn how to distinguish the scams from the real projects (it's really easy after lurking for a few weeks). It's easy as shit. Observe the market, buy some of the bluechips after a dump when everyone is posting pink Wojaks, then sell them once everyone starts posting about how they're going to quit their job forever because the line is going to keep going up.

>>19035776
Thanks sticking around. Makes me feel bad when people effortposts go unnoticed.

>>19035803
>The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.

Arthur Schopenhauer

>>19035834
The bluechips have done nothing but appreciate since 2017. Worst case scenario is you buy the top and have to wait a few months before you're in the green, but basically most of the top 20 on coinmarketcap has done nothing but make you free money if you held it the past four years, and it shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

>>19035849
>The bluechips have done nothing but appreciate since 2017.
Are you talking about investment-value or Crypto?

>>19035866
Crypto

>>19035808
>it is merely a relative nothing,
Where does he say this? I can clearly imagine how it might feel like, as absolute and constant tranquility. The only problem with his view - which you captured when you said "this has never happened to anybody" - is that if it has happened even once to a person in the history, since the will is one then it should have abolished the will in everyone, not just in that person. Which furthermore means that if it had happened then we wouldn't have this active will right now. I am entertaining the idea that whether the will cyclically returns to being One and again the Many, recreating itself and the world after being abolished each time.
>>19035816
I think you are missing something integral: The will is *one*. The will you see in yourself and the one I see in myself and all other "wills" are one and the same.
>Free from all plurality, although its phenomena in time and space are innumerable. It is itself one, yet not as an object is one, for the unity of an object is known only in contrast to possible plurality. Again, [it] is one not as a concept is one, for a concept originates only through abstraction from plurality; but it is one as that which lies outside time and space, outside the principium individuationis, that is to say, outside the possibility of plurality.

>>19035454
>>19035479
>>19035520
btfo retard. stop talking about things you are ignorant of.

>>19035830

It's a broad range of things, I don't even remember exactly which subject corresponds to each year, but it goes through most branches of philosophy, especially through the big names (in ethics being Kant, Mill, Richard Hare), political philosophy (hobbes, rawls, locke, isaiah berlin, robert nozick from the ones i recall), philosophy of language (wittgenstein, leibniz), philosophy of technology (this was the most interesting one personally, it related to the new questions that arise with the new technology, like VR and the nature of reality, privacy concerns in the age of data collection and surveillance systems through social media (i actually wrote my dissertation on this), others were related to global issues, a course of logic, we had Foucault, Spinoza, Nietzsche.

To be honest I wasn't in the "hardcore" part of philosophy (where you go in depth with phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophy of mind, hardcore logic course, with hard philosophers like hegel and heidegger). That's why I'm trying to fill the blanks. I think any philosophy graduate should be familiar with the ideas of all big names, at least in the broader picture.

So the curriculum is pretty all-encompassing if you are in the pure philosophy department (i was in philosophy and european studies, so it didn't go as much in depth, but despite that I did read more than I was shown at the courses.

>>19035893
Long ago, I have read a trick about getting precise answers on internet. The trick is to post made up bullshit so the intelligent people who have spend long time studying a subject will take your bullshit as a personal attack and to BTFO you they will post a precise answer. 98% of the time this asshole strategy works.

>>19035925
>>19035830

2/2

Also the greeks of course, my bad for forgetting (pre-socratics, plato, aristotle).

But to add to the last answer, when I was in college I didn't give my whole interest into studying (which didn't affect my grades or anything). Maybe because of the setting. I hate "having to" learn something in a set order. So after I finished college and I was free in that way, my urge to read flare up, knowing there's no exam pressures or anything and that I can take my time to read things at my own pace.

>>19035682
>I don't know what you're saying; are you a dualist or something?
intensive quantities as heat or pressure are non-additive like extensive quantities like height or weight.
The causes of pleasure and pain cannot be determined as extensive sums, nor as differences of intensive homologous quantities as "cualitative temperature x = warmth x / cold x". Pain and pleasure are multiplicities of heterogeneous intensities in the way that they are non-dialectical (as warmth/coldness), just as Schopenhauer said, but complicated and compositive as taste with temperature with medium with matter, etc.

The fact that pessimist babies aren't capable to understand this tell all you need to know about them and why you should avoid taking them seriously (beside Schopenhauer himself, that was a cool person).

>>19035938
yes, I'm aware and I employ it often. that was not the case in this situation.

>>19036068
I haven't yet read world as will.

>>19036093
i doubt you ever will

>>19035759
>for everyone who is still filled with the will, what remains after it is completely abolished is certainly nothing. But conversely, for those in whom the will has turned and negated itself, this world of ours which is so very real with all its suns and galaxies is – nothing.
This comes after a full paragraph where he discusses how absolute nothingness can not exist/be concieved. Read before posting

>>19036107
Stop acting like my dad, go away with doubt.

>>19034828
That's literally fucking impossible retard.

>>19035653

And his mum remarried or whatever shortly after. Very based. Women will keep a long queue of suitors even during a marriage in case she gets bored, or you die. And if you die then she's certain to be bored

>>19036156
clean your room

>>19034654
>Any truly objective, rational interrogation of the will-to-life leads to the same conclusion: that non-existence is infinitely preferable to existence proper.

He's not talking about killing the body, he's talking about killing the soul. You shouldn't kill yourself because you very likely cant.

>>19035938
it doesn't work. the people answering you are just amateurs or undergrads

>>19035938
If you had actually employed this strategy you would realise nobody on the internet knows anything.

>>19035595
An "honest, successful man" is one sufficiently blinded by false hopes and positive emotions so as to be unable or unwilling to follow the purely rational line of thinking every pessimist goes through. The reasons for life rejection are not emotional; they are quite practical and unequivocal. In my opinion it simply takes someone who has been stripped of the illusory, protective emotions to see life for what it really is. You are well within your rights to ignore it but to say it's not sensible is false.

>>19038036
you assume pessimism to be correct and use that assumption as proof of pessimism's validity.
regardless, pessimism as a tool can be useful, depending on the situation (like in science). that i agree with. but, whether its correct or not, i dont see any value in it as a philosophy given that it often makes men despondent and reject the fruits of life. what's there to be gained from it?

>>19034657
fpbp, OP doesn’t know what he’s talking about no surprise

>>19038278
>gained from it
Oh, futile shadow called man.

>>19038298
How so?

>>19035365
/thread

you're right. on the first pages of book 4 he speaks of Kant's 'you ought to will' ethical principles as not just naive, but a total contradiction.

>>19035885
No you still don't see. The will is one in the same way Parmenides will is one: it's not actually one, but we are incapable of calling it anything else; it's a quirk of linguistics, not a statement of fact.

The will is outside of space/time, and as such can't have anything predicated of it a priori, only a posteriori, and just as it can't have predicates, so it can't have parts, plurality. The will is not one, and not many, yet linguistically it is more not many than not one, we simply have to refer to it as one because we can't conceptualize properly a thing not conditioned by space/time.The phenomena Schopenhauer attributes to the will is from a empirical view, and that the empirical phenomena appear to all be the same, the will manifesting itself in the same way in different living creatures, is why he refers to it as one: its effects seem to be the same; yet this is a empirical statement, he is NOT predicating these characteristics to the one, the will, which as it is outside of space/time causality is incapable of having things predicated of it.

>>19034654
Have there ever been anti-natalist children? As in people who were aware that non-existence is preferable to existence ever since they could think?

>>19036046
1) that's wrong and a stupid hangover from idealists: of course pleasure/pain can be physically quantified, indeed Schopenhauer, given his predilection towards biology would have agreed. Regardless you dodged the ethical statement, agreed upon by every ethic I've seen, that the world is more pain than pleasure, and that we've to do SOMETHING, to actually attain enduring happiness.

Scopenhauer just had good sense. Any philosophy that just advocates suicide is dead in the water. Because if you generalize it to all life its ethical conclusion is just murder everyone and everything and that's just cringe edgelord behavior. "Bro we are the fucking cancer... we should go extinct.."

>>19039353
No. People tend to prefer life over death if their experience in life has been horrible thus far. Even in the case of the most rational and logical mind determining that life is not worth it in any respect would be colored by their experience of joy or pain in making this judgement.

For a child to know only pain and no joy they would have to be so abused and mistreated that they would probably not survive, and certainly they would be unable to speak or think clearly enough to have any kind of philosophy.

>>19039426
Childhood was an emergent phenomena necessary for the existence of fully grown life forms. I.E. you can't make universalising statements about a unified being without taking into account its pupal/adolescent/embryonic stage.

If I go to a war and enjoy myself for most of it, then at the end get shot, I've had a bad war.

>>19038684
so then its useless

>>19038278
>pessimism as a tool
>i dont see any value in it
>what's there to be gained from it?
Your mindset is so far away from understanding pessimist thought the kindest advice I could give you is to ignore it completely, it won't do you any good.
Pessimists postulate that there is nothing to be gained at all from life, in the long run. Anything you think that you've "gained" is transient, often illusory, and often at the expense of someone else or of your future prosperity. And what have "tools'" done for us so far? Brought us closer to the unmistakable realisation that we are alone, here by accident, and are too wretched and flawed to ever have our needs sustainably met and live justly and peacefully on this planet. The central point is that your value judgements are irrelevant in the face of the inevitable. The reason this line of thinking is called 'pessimism' and not just 'realism' in our society is because a normal human has protective positive emotions and a sense of blind faith (manifesting in some as belief in God) to shelter him from reality. That bit is my theory anyway.

All of his philosophy was refuted by Nietzsche's comment that he played the flute after dinner.

>>19039863
Flute was one of the main instruments played at Greek tragedies. It is sad as fuck. For someone who liked music Nietzsche was retarded about music.

>>19039847
you're thinking of life on too broadly of a scope to be of any worth. whether it's illusory or selfish in the broadest extent of the word isn't useful. when our lives are already so fickle, ruminating on imminent death is a waste of time and energy that could be used to build a better future or at least enjoy the moment. you suggest the tools we've built are useless, but we prove its usefulness through our online conversation based around the writings of schopenhauer.

from what i can tell, pessimism values being correct over all else, which sounds great in theory, but is totally impractical for imperfect, fairly powerless beings like us. we cant change the intrinsic mechanics of life, so, imo, there's no need to burden ourselves with them unless to it's alleviate its consequences.

>>19035784
Kek you're me but I was on /mu/ instead of /lit/ first

>>19039863
this is the dumbest non-argument i've ever had the displeasure of reading