Post: #1

I was curious about what most of this forum's posters identify as and thought it might be interesting to have a thread for random philosophical thoughts/discussions.
While it is difficult to peg myself down to one philosophy and that takes too much dedication, most of my cluster of thoughts on life walls within nihilism/schopenhauer-ism. Schopenhauer is often quoted for his famous essay "On Women" in the manosphere but I don't know how many of you have read his other works or subscribe to him. These quotes should give you a general idea of his outlook.

"Yet what a difference there is between our beginning and our end. We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And die road from the one to the other too goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill: happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death - does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest. We shall do best to think of life ...as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce."

"The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. Time and that perishability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing in itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving. Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value"

I have genuinely tried for my own sake and happiness to find fault in this, and couldn't.

This makes it particularly difficult to decide if I will ever have children. When you look at a person with say, Downs Syndrome, it's pretty evident what the process of life is(a cut throat, amoral, gene pool competition), and if one miniscule genetic mutation could make it such hell, what is it all worth then? Who am I to force somebody into existence?

Post: #2

Thinking briefly, I would say many people here are utilitarian hedonists.

I believe Nietzsche critiques Schopenhauer's pessimism, you may want to look there for your answers.

Personally it's all a bit sloppy to me. Armchair theorists painting fantasy worlds with tiny brushes. Here's how I would break it down:

Quote:

Quote:We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses.

That is not necessarily true, cf. artificial insemination.

Quote:And die road from the one to the other too goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill

Here you are implying there is a metric on enjoyment. However, there is no such thing. Can you put a number on how much you enjoyed that burger? At best you can measure neurochemical release less exposure, but not only has that never been done, not only is it infeasible to unobtrusively measure this for a single person's entire life, but generalizing that to the entire human population with any sort of error would require a century of effort. By that time the human experience may well be decidedly different. It makes no sense to assume we can even talk about trends in human enjoyment when there is no reason to say we can meaningfully measure it.

Quote:happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death

This is not necessarily the case. Indeed, historically most men not alive today have not lived past 30 and that is hardly wretched old age.

Quote:does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest.

Define error. Here he is assuming there is ever an incorrect choice. More subtly he is assuming that what is an incorrect choice is invariant over time. However, these claims are unjustified.

Quote:We shall do best to think of life ...as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce.

He is implying there is a best way to think of life. Again, no way to measure whether one way to think of things is better than another.

Armchair fantasies of the worst sort. Half of what he says has no meaning and the other half is evoked from thin air.

Still, if you find this reasoning convincing, I would recommend you take a short course on logic.

Post: #3

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both failures with women, so it is hard to take either too seriously on this subject matter!

Post: #4

(10-08-2012 07:31 PM)ghostdog Wrote:  Schopenhauer is often quoted for his famous essay "On Women" in the manosphere but I don't know how many of you have read his other works or subscribe to him.

I subscribed for a while but his trolling of @Hegel and his in-jokes with @Kierkegaard got old pretty fast.

Post: #5

(10-09-2012 06:28 AM)storm Wrote:  Thinking briefly, I would say many people here are utilitarian hedonists.

I believe Nietzsche critiques Schopenhauer's pessimism, you may want to look there for your answers.

Personally it's all a bit sloppy to me. Armchair theorists painting fantasy worlds with tiny brushes. Here's how I would break it down:

Quote:

Quote:We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses.

That is not necessarily true, cf. artificial insemination.

Quote:And die road from the one to the other too goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill

Here you are implying there is a metric on enjoyment. However, there is no such thing. Can you put a number on how much you enjoyed that burger? At best you can measure neurochemical release less exposure, but not only has that never been done, not only is it infeasible to unobtrusively measure this for a single person's entire life, but generalizing that to the entire human population with any sort of error would require a century of effort. By that time the human experience may well be decidedly different. It makes no sense to assume we can even talk about trends in human enjoyment when there is no reason to say we can meaningfully measure it.

Quote:happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death

This is not necessarily the case. Indeed, historically most men not alive today have not lived past 30 and that is hardly wretched old age.

Quote:does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest.

Define error. Here he is assuming there is ever an incorrect choice. More subtly he is assuming that what is an incorrect choice is invariant over time. However, these claims are unjustified.

Quote:We shall do best to think of life ...as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce.

He is implying there is a best way to think of life. Again, no way to measure whether one way to think of things is better than another.

Armchair fantasies of the worst sort. Half of what he says has no meaning and the other half is evoked from thin air.

Still, if you find this reasoning convincing, I would recommend you take a short course on logic.

Do you have Asperger's Syndrome?

Your criticisms are asinine and pedantic, i.e. bringing up artificial insemination in an attempt to refute statement of fact that humans are naturally conceived during an act of carnal passion (sex). It's like saying that we don't need hands because some guy in India without arms can hold a spoon between his toes. The exception is not the rule.

And your post reeks of know-it-all-ism. Look how easily your brilliant mind picks apart one of the greatest intellects of all time. Laugh.

You're so smart and you don't even understand that your life expectancy chart factors in infant mortality, which massively reduced the average life expectancy in years past since a huge number of children born didn't survive past the age of 10. But people who reached a healthy adulthood in the old days tended to live as long as we do now (Schopenhauer died of a heart attack at 72, Plato died at 80, etc...).

You're grasping at straws to find fault in the philosophy of a man who was much smarter than you, and much more deliberate in his thinking and writing. Classic hater behavior.

You should probably make the effort to actually read Schopenhauer if you're going to pretend to be expert enough to make worthwhile criticism. You're getting caught up playing games with definitions and semantics (i.e. "define this", "no way to measure that"). This is the lowest form of debate/criticism. Instead of attempting to refute the argument itself, you pick apart individual words and phrases and attempt to muddy the waters to hide the fact that you have no real argument.

Seriously I feel like I'm in Philosophy 101 listening to some nerd try to pick apart Plato to prove his own genius.

Post: #6

(10-09-2012 10:21 AM)scorpion Wrote:  Do you have Asperger's Syndrome?

Your criticisms are asinine and pedantic, i.e. bringing up artificial insemination in an attempt to refute statement of fact that humans are naturally conceived during an act of carnal passion (sex). It's like saying that we don't need hands because some guy in India without arms can hold a spoon between his toes. The exception is not the rule.

And your post reeks of know-it-all-ism. Look how easily your brilliant mind picks apart one of the greatest intellects of all time. Laugh.

You're so smart and you don't even understand that your life expectancy chart factors in infant mortality, which massively reduced the average life expectancy in years past since a huge number of children born didn't survive past the age of 10. But people who reached a healthy adulthood in the old days tended to live as long as we do now (Schopenhauer died of a heart attack at 72, Plato died at 80, etc...).

You're grasping at straws to find fault in the philosophy of a man who was much smarter than you, and much more deliberate in his thinking and writing. Classic hater behavior.

You should probably make the effort to actually read Schopenhauer if you're going to pretend to be expert enough to make worthwhile criticism. You're getting caught up playing games with definitions and semantics (i.e. "define this", "no way to measure that"). This is the lowest form of debate/criticism. Instead of attempting to refute the argument itself, you pick apart individual words and phrases and attempt to muddy the waters to hide the fact that you have no real argument.

Seriously I feel like I'm in Philosophy 101 listening to some nerd try to pick apart Plato to prove his own genius.

First off, why the hate? Cut that out.

Second, the OP asked for something wrong with the above arguments and I told him. There are serious logical fallacies, and calling them pedantic does not resolve the issue. You seem upset because I did not discuss some larger argument, assuming that all of the assertions were true. But it is downright misleading to talk about what would happen in some fantasy universe in which an increasingly large number of assumptions hold true. People risk confusing schopenhauer's fantasy universe with their own.

Quote:You're getting caught up playing games with definitions and semantics (i.e. "define this", "no way to measure that").

I'm not 'getting caught up' with that. It's the entire point of the argument.

What I'm saying is that Schopenhauer's arguments - like many philosophers' - here are sloppy. He is assuming you can compare two things, assuming you can conclude one is in some way greater than the other when the truth is that such an occurrence is very rare.

Is laptop A better than laptop B? One is faster, the other is smaller and tougher. For work, the former is best, for travel the latter. But if someone says 'laptop A is better than laptop B', would bringing the attention to the fact that there is no meaningful way to compare - in general - any two laptops be pedantic?


The entire point of my argument was to say that his argument is sloppy. You seem not to have a good grasp on what logic is. Take for example,

Quote:It's like saying that we don't need hands because some guy in India without arms can hold a spoon between his toes.

It is correct to say that we don't need hands to hold spoons if we can hold spoons between our toes. Am I being pedantic? Yes. Is this true? Yes. Is anything less precise acceptable? No. If you want to make a logical argument, it must be water-tight. It is either always true or not. If there is even one small problem with an argument the whole thing is useless. That is how logic works.

We give many allowances in forums, we are sloppy and try to paint broader strokes, but philosophical works are not granted such leniency, and should not be.

You may be thinking now that if we have to be so specific philosophy will get nowhere. Indeed. There is really precious little we can say philosophically with any meaning. That is my point. These philosophers dabble in generalities with no real idea of how this chaotic cauldron of statements "true more often than not" will turn out. They don't even try. We have real ways to deal with this - statistics, mathematics, engineering principles - which are used by real people to solve real problems. Why? It works, it's rigorous, it's falsifiable.

I don't see any of that here. It's a bunch of fluffy words thrown around like some fantasy novel. There is a reason why philosophers were never taken seriously.

The worst part of this sort of pop philosophy is that when someone puts forward a counterexample to some argument, people rally forward to call it pedantic and an only-sometimes occurrence, and then turn around blindly apply that same argument to their own lives.

It's exactly your train of thought that allows people to rationalize murdering in the name of religion. Exactly: from the deliberate ignoring of fundamental logical fallacies through the ad hominem and straight up to the ego worship and consequent acceptance of arguments from authority.

Post: #7

(10-09-2012 12:12 PM)storm Wrote:  It is correct to say that we don't need hands to hold spoons if we can hold spoons between our toes. Am I being pedantic? Yes. Is this true? Yes. Is anything less precise acceptable? No. If you want to make a logical argument, it must be water-tight. It is either always true or not. If there is even one small problem with an argument the whole thing is useless. That is how logic works.

I'm not going to waste time in a big back and forth here, I'm just going to point out that the major problem is that you're exerting a hypercritical focus on two sentences and then affirming that the man's entire philosophy is useless.

It's obvious you've never seriously read any Schopenhauer.

Which is why the man himself said, for this exact reason, "Either read me in my entirety or don't read me at all." Schopenhauer was a system builder, not a point by point logician, so you need to understand the major points of the philosophical system he constructed before beginning to poke holes in any one piece, because philosophical systems are structural, and certain elements follow logically from arguments and definitions which were previously established.

What you are doing is no different than a man who says, "Logically, a stone cannot remain stationary 10 feet in the air." Which is perfectly true. You are logically correct. Except if the stone happens to be a keystone, which is supported by other stones previously erected underneath it, and for which you failed to account.



The definitions and semantics you're grasping after are covered ad nauseum in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Idea.

You should check it out. You are obviously a smart guy, so I think you would have no trouble understanding it, especially given that Schopenhauer was an unusually good writer as far as philosophers go.

Post: #8

First off, I do love Schopenhauer. But there are problems in his analysis.

(Also, let's not pretend that Schopenhauer is 100% original. His analysis can be traced back to the Stoics and Cynics of Ancient Greece.)

Schopenhauer Wrote:Yet what a difference there is between our beginning and our end. We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And die road from the one to the other too goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill: happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death - does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest. We shall do best to think of life ...as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce.

Simply because the pleasures of life peak around middle age it means life is an error? This is question begging; life is disappointing because life is short and therefore disappointing?

More to the point: Is it better to live shortly and abruptly or to have never lived at all?

I disagree with Schopenhauer that life is nothing but disillusionment, for the reasons that Schopenhauer omits in the next paragraph:

Quote:The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. Time and that perishability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing in itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving. Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value

Although it is completely true that nearly everything in life is fleeting or contingent, and thus there can be said to be no true satisfaction, does it mean it's not worth having at all? Certainly it isn't for me. I'm enjoying my youth even though it cannot last.

And I say "nearly" everything is fleeting or contingent, because there is one important exception. That exception is Truth itself, of which we need only look at Schopenhauer's words - look at how well they speak to us, nearly 150 years after his death. How can his words continue to exist and speak to us if Schopenhauer is dead?

That is because the Truth is eternal, and is really the only thing worth seeking out over the course of our rather limited, and depressing, lifetimes. The Truth will set you free, the Truth offers us salvation from sickness, aging, and death, and the Truth offers the only chance out of the problems inherent with existence.

By the way, this isn't my argument - it goes back to Socrates. However, I myself am a Kantian (hence my avatar), and I fully subscribe to the worldview of "things-in-themselves" vs. "things-as-we-perceive-them".

Post: #9

I would label myself as an existential nihilist, i believe that everything is completely random and im only here because the random arrangement of atoms allowed me to have consciousness. I dont think ill ever be able to change my view on that, and it does help me have a "dgaf" attitude, if you will. Although, believing this has made it hard for me to be happy and i honestly cant describe how "happy" feels or if ive ever truly felt it. Im still trying to shape myself and become what I want to be, mabye being happy will follow.

Post: #10

(10-09-2012 01:43 PM)Galaxy Wrote:  i believe that everything is completely random and im only here because the random arrangement of atoms allowed me to have consciousness.

Give up that belief and you might find things are not so random.

Post: #11

(10-09-2012 07:29 AM)tiggaling Wrote:  Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both failures with women, so it is hard to take either too seriously on this subject matter!

Agree, but the "subject" here is not women. Even if they had advice for women (I think Nietzsche does) i would not discard it on the basis that they were not succesful themselves.

Post: #12

(10-09-2012 07:29 AM)tiggaling Wrote:  Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both failures with women, so it is hard to take either too seriously on this subject matter!

It's a bit narrow minded to say that. Not every man who discovers the truth about the weaker sex turns around and uses this to become a player. Schopenhauer doesn't strike me as an epicurean hedonist.

Many good points in this.
http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/onwomen.html

Post: #13

Random musings:

-I have noticed how the manosphere seems to be torn between hedonism and organized solutions which makes me wonder about the future of it.

-One of the biggest sources of dysfunction society is the indecision about sex... is it a pair bonding/procreation thing or is it pure leisure? Lack of consensus about this and the disregard of "bigoted" sociobiology will continue to wreck all things we typically value.

-Atheist feminists.. What the fuck? How do these two words combine into a legitimate cause and how did a whole cult grow around it? What's the whole idea here? "Evolution is true.. so lets sabotage it?"

Post: #14

(10-10-2012 08:54 AM)ghostdog Wrote:  -Atheist feminists.. What the fuck? How do these two words combine into a legitimate cause and how did a whole cult grow around it? What's the whole idea here? "Evolution is true.. so lets sabotage it?"

that's the thing though, they don't see it like that. to them it's just empowering and moving forward and becoming progressive.

Post: #15

-I am very much a pro-natalist, enough so that explicitly anti-natalist arguments (which I find to be quite common online these days) annoy me. I believe that were are here, first and foremost, to reproduce and that it is through reproduction that humans are most able to maximize their relevance as individuals in the vast expanse of existence. I believe that reproduction is the main function of sexual intercourse (the pleasure it offers is secondary), and that the act is less valuable (though still obviously worthwhile) without that purpose in mind. I could not imagine choosing not to have children. I want as many as I can sire and support (hopefully at least 4).

-I am far from a nihilist. I believe that human life has meaning and intrinsic value. I do believe that there is a greaterpower and/or a deity out there, but I do not believe that humanity possesses the capability to be objectively certain about the existence or characteristics of this otherworldly power. In short, I'm an agnostic theist.

(10-08-2012 07:31 PM)ghostdog Wrote:  This makes it particularly difficult to decide if I will ever have children. When you look at a person with say, Downs Syndrome, it's pretty evident what the process of life is(a cut throat, amoral, gene pool competition), and if one miniscule genetic mutation could make it such hell, what is it all worth then?

The mere possibility of failure does not invalidate the worth of success.

The mere possibility of a genetic disorder does not invalidate the value of reproduction and the benefits it brings to those who participate in it, the society in which they exist and the species as a whole.

Quote:Who am I to force somebody into existence?

You're a human. Like all animals, reproduction is at the core of your biological imperative. You don't need special permission to create a new generation. To ask "who am I" to partake in an activity that is not only at the core of human biological imperative but essential to the persistence of every living being on this planet (all of whom partake in it without question) is to invest far too much thought into the matter.

Post: #16

I don't like pigeonholing my ides for that constrains my thoughts and makes me less open to ideas from other camps. But I would have to say that I am an existential and moral nihilist as well as an utilitarian hedonist. I thought long and hard about these subjects and came to the conclusions that I did. After I came to those conclusions I began to discover these streams of thought that encapsulated my ideas and set them to words better than I did.
I think that existential nihilism is best captured in this statement (credited to myself of course):Life is not a message whose meaning is to be discerned, it is an occurrence that mere chance allowed it to happen.
Moral Nihilism is best defined as a rejection that there aren't any innate right or wrongs, no good or bad. For me the only bad thing is to do something that hurts me and reduces my total utility. Of course that same thing that is bad for me might be good for you by increasing your utility. How then can you classify something like the Newtown massacre as anything other than evil? It is through acknowledging the fact that the shooter was acting in his own perceived self-interest. He thought it would give increase his utility to commit such an atrocity, this is probably due to his mental illness, and that's why he did it.
Utilitarian hedonism to me is simply the idea that one's sole purpose in life is to maximize his utility and therefore maximize his pleasure and minimize his pain. Of course by Pleasure and Pain I am referring to simply any acts that make you feel good and any acts that make you feel bad, it doesn't specifically have to be physical. Hedonism also refers to the idea that pleasure is the only intrinsic good, which I agree with. And while this seems like it clashes with the idea that there isn't any good, which comes from moral nihilism, they don't clash because moral nihilism's assertion that there is no good or bad is not concerned with good for you or bad for you. It is simply concerned with good or bad.

Post: #17

I don't have to learn anybody's philosophy. I have extra sharp cheddar cheese in the refrigerator and chocolate shakes too. Think, think, think; looking for the horse while you're riding it.

Post: #18

I heard Nietzsche caught the syph from a prostie.

Might have influenced his view of women some.