Who is the most pessimistic philosopher?

Read his fiction instead

A few Normies think that anhedonia, the suspension of the will is the cessation of the misery. That is quite good for normies, but they always fail to see hw to get their.
Comtemplating like the normie hegel says, or Schopenhauer and being an artist is not the way to suspend the will. THis is why normies are shit at anything. Even they say something with a tiny bit of relevance, they always mess things up with the next statement.

Cioran is undeniably a downer, but at some points his "philosophy" seems to me to border on poetry. He seems like he's trying to express some sublimity of life through pessimism.

Plus, he believed in God, though he hated him, and he maintained meaningful intimate relationships his entire life.

Zapffe, on the other hand, seemed stuck in complete despair.

Phillipp Mainländer. Life is worthless, nothingness is

>Does Buddhism only apply to those with healthy minds? If your dopamine system is damaged, is enlightenment impossible?
The students will have the healthy mind, since they are told to meditate before thinking their misery.
Without meditation, only very few people who get awakened alone, can derive the solution to their misery, once they see how unhappy they are, through the naive, down to earth introspection
(which really means ''I am sad, all I want now is the radical stop of being sad, whatever the consequences this would bring to my existence and I accept them, I only care about no longer being unhappy; then I am sad because I take up consciousness, feelings and all that stuff always impermanent and uncontrollable which did not give me what I wanted before (for very long) no matter how much effort I put I keeping the good states''; I am no longer sad, once and for all, once I do not take up those stuff always impermanent and uncontrollable'' then the dispassion towards all those stuff happens which brings the knowledge of ''right view''; then the natural and only relevant step to do is to mediate to settle this right view once and for all and be done with the path.
Before this meditation, daily life has no joy, but there is no sadness; it is depression without sadness (because no view about personality through consciousness, feelings and all that stuff) . The only sadness that there is is the knowledge that there is no mediation carried needed to finish the path.)

Have you read more from him then "The Last Messiah"? I get the sense that he gives people a method of lessening their own pain and the pain of others through artistic sublimation and self evaluation, and so can be considered in a perpetual animistic awe - followed by bouts consciousness.

But then I don't goes to big boy schools like y'alls did.

i am

Did people actually start translating him?

I have not read beyond The Last Messiah. I find it incredibly difficult to find any decent English publications of his work. You certainly sound like you could be right, having read more than I have.

>But then I don't goes to big boy schools like y'alls did.
Why is this an assumption? I'd assume that most Veeky Forums posters don't do much with their life.

Edgiest reply in this thread.

Albert Caraco.

>L'Enfer, que nous portons en nous, répond à l'Enfer de nos villes, nos villes sont à la mesure de nos contenus mentaux, la volonté de mort préside à la fureur de vivre et nous ne parvenons à discerner laquelle nous inspire, nous nous précipitons dans les travaux recommencés et nous nous flattons de nous élever aux cimes, la démesure nous possède et sans nous concevoir nous mêmes, nous bâtissons toujours.
>Le monde ne sera bientôt plus qu'un chantier où, pareils aux termites, des milliards d'aveugles, embesognés à perdre haleine, besogneront, dans la rumeur et le relent, comme des automates, avant que de se réveiller, un jour, en proie à la démence et de s'entr'égorger sans lassitude. En l'univers, où nous nous enfonçons, la démence est la forme que prendra la spontanéité de l'homme aliéné, de l'homme possédé, de l'homme dépassé par les moyens et devenu l'esclave de ses œuvres. La folie couve désormais sous nos immeubles de cinquante étages et malgré nos empressements à la déraciner, nous ne viendrons à bout de la réduire, elle est ce dieu nouveau, que nous n'apaiserons plus même en lui rendant une façon de culte : c'est notre mort qu'incessamment elle réclame toute.

>Albert Caraco.

Never heard of him. Thank you.

I came in here a newfag during winter. And not till the end of school year has it become so filled with these people.

I've been having some glorious times since winter trying to discern the locations of various not-to-be-spooken-of sects that fucked with my shit. I default to hate here too quickly. But it's only a provisional wall that has nothing to do with my actual persona. This, then, is why.

Adorno

The fact Cioran did not kill himself, and died from old age instead, casts serious doubt on his positions (about suicide, notably).

They look like the product of some aesthetic pose one should enjoy, rather than an "ethical code" one should believe and follow.

>The fact Cioran did not kill himself, and died from old age instead, casts serious doubt on his positions (about suicide, notably).

I disagree. Many people who were antinatalist and generally pessimistic about 'being' thought that suicide was not a proper response. e.g. Samuel Beckett, who found life totally empty but considered suicide an impossibility. I don't think that it's improper for someone who is a philosophic pessimist to deny the validity of suicide as a response. I guess an easy boiled down synopsis of this position would be "we were not given the choice on being born, thus it follows we should not have the choice on being destroyed. To do so would give ourselves too much power over our own existence, which we inherently lack."

Adding to I do think that Cioran got a little too 'excited' about his philosophy. I think that he began as a man in despair, trying to write about how empty he felt about life. But then somewhere along the line he began to get excited, and his ability to write so elegantly on pessimistic themes actually, paradoxically, became his reason for living. I think he lost himself in this way. His philosophy became insincere because he began to love it, which gave him a reason to live, which makes his philosophy more poetry than polemic. I don't think suicide has anything to do with it.

Hegesias of Cyrene

Here's an example of the writing from A Short History of Decay, written after he had found his 'groove' and was living in cosmopolitan Paris. For me it does not read at all like philosophy, but more like Mallarmé or other late 19th century poets.

"Who has not known those fears, those dizzy spells, those deliriums which bring us back to the beast, back to the last problems? Our knees tremble but do not bend; our hands clutch without clasping each other; our eyes look up and see nothing... We preserve that vertical pride which strengthens its courage; that horror of gesures which saves us from spectacle; and the succor of eyelids to veil and absurdly ineffable gaze. Our collapse is imminent but not inevitable; the accident is odd, but scarcely new; already a smile dawns on the horizon of our terrors... we shall not topple into prayed... for after all He must not triumph; it is up to our irony to compromise His capital letter; up to our heart to dissolve the shudders He dispenses."

That reads as though Cioran was having deep enjoyment with writing it. The vocabulary and form does not remind me of 20th century philosophy at all. It reads more like Pessoa. It's like Cioran has created a heteronym in the character of "E.M. Cioran" whereby he can write all this elegant, poetic 'philosophy' under the guise of reality. But I'd imagine a philosophy grad student would have an impossible time writing a dissertation on Cioran or something of the sort.

It reads more like the writings of the saints, if you're familiar with this kind of literature.

My problem with Cioran is that he's not really fair. He complains that he's unknown while being a published author (what should I say if I'm unpublished, then?), he complains that Paris is ugly while living in its most beautiful neighborhoods (what should I say if I live in a legitimately ugly suburb, then?), etc.

Haven't read Cioran yet, but ...

Can't you just argue that pessimism acknowledges all that arises from consciousness as painful. And that even the rationalising of your own death is itself not trustworthy to end the pain.

I admit that you mostly pose in conscious thought as a pessimist if you claim to be one, and I do back away from that claim. I move towards the idea of embodying that "animal" state, zen or whatever - which occurs by certain realisations of the body becoming the centre of consciousness. This doesn't do away with reasoning as a pessimist though.

On witnessing a suicide jump one day, in that moment of self destruction, the person was acting from a rationalised notion that they weren't sure would succeed and yet did so anyway. The point for me would be if there were animals in the wild that did so, I wouldn't have felt so horrible about how reason and consciousness plays with us and even wants to destroy us.

Yup. It's a common practice in the 20th and 21st centuries so far to romanticize feeling miserable. Some people do it well; some people come across as people happy about feeling sad.

The melancholy of an English garden.

Hobbes comes close, but he believes in world peace, which is quite funny after all his work.
He was also basically right about almost everything

I agree. Cioran honestly seemed like a normie poseur. What did he even do in his spare time? He never had a job and his books were like 40 pages long.

Fucking noted, man. That's great. Hope you don't mind if I use that to try and pick up chicks with Persol glasses.

Hi guys what's going on in this thread.

drink. smoke. sex. eat at nice Paris bistros. He wrote letters with a lot of the continental intelligentsia of the time.

ya know. things that make you sad.

This is why I'm skeptical of Cioran. He suffered as a form of profitable recreation. Philip Larkin and Fernando Pessoa are great because they are skeptical and miserable older guys who worked and suffered in relative obscurity for a long time. Cioran somehow was able to earn a living on royalties it seemed just by publishing a 100 page book every 10 years.

Caraco is just a more obscure Cioran

>bro your book got published
>nice man, I'll just use the first batch as a platform to neck myself

wew lad

Mainlander's death is probably the most exit-tier Veeky Forumserary symbolic gesture ever performed. Nobody can top that. Edouard Leve came close by writing a book entitled Suicide and handing it to his publishers before killing himself a few days later. DFW came close by writing a novel and leaving it on his desk with a lamp shining on it before killing himself. Heisman came close by writing his 1,500+ page Suicide Note and shooting himself on the most holy day in Judaism. But Mainlander tops it for sure. He is black pilled as f**k. You can't get more literary than Philip Mainlander. Dude isn't even translated into English yet. That's how hardcore he is.

t. autist

Schopenhauer definitely.

Caraco is much darker, less sensual, a tighter stylist, and he actually killed himself.

Good one.

Potocki's suicide is extremely edgy too.

I don't know if obscurity is what makes the difference. Beckett is my favorite in the manner he treats his emptiness and anxiety, but he received a high degree of acclaim after the 50s.

The difference I see is that Cioran called himself a philosopher, and considered his books to be works in the inheritance of the western philosophic tradition. Beckett, Pessoa, and Larkin all knew they were poets; they were writing fiction. They had no pretense about having philosophically investigated into some inherent truth, valuable to the tradition of philosophy. I bet Cioran would've made a decent novelist or a great dramatist. But he took his prose too seriously.

How so?

It's hard to tell what Cioran actually considered himself. He was reportedly very different in person from what you'd expect from his books. His constant deliberate self-contradiction adds to the confusion.

Didn't know about Potocki, thanks for posting. Still, I think the younger a suicide is the more noble and aesthetic it is. Once you reach 50 what's the point of living anyway?

>His constant deliberate self-contradiction adds to the confusion.

Yes, and that's a major reason why I still read & enjoy Cioran. I feel like in that self-contradiction he best follows in the tradition of Plato, moreso than most philosophers, especially modern. Plato had the same kind of contradictions, but it was just because Plato was the most supreme ironist in history. He criticized drama for using the voices of other people rather than the poet speaking with his own voice, but then, obviously, this criticism applies to his own work, as Plato ONLY wrote under the voices of other people and never in his own voice. I see that Platonic playfulness and irony in Cioran. But I can't consider Cioran a philosopher on the level of Plato.

>and never in his own voice

Before anyone jumps on me, I will add "expect possibly in his Letters."

I think I'm just being a brainlet, but can someone explain to me why these pessimist philosophers do not choose suicide. "It would be as pointless as any other choice." So? Isn't continuing to live as pointless as any other choice too? "We didn't choose to be born, so we shouldn't choose to die." Seriously? What is the reasoning behind that?
Do they just not want to feel the phsycial pain that comes with suicide? Do they not want to upset their loved ones? (But don't they regard such empathy as nothing more than an illusion??) Do they suspect that there may yet be a chance that death does not lead to non-existence after all?
What is blackmailing them, exactly?

There is the practical factors that suicides can fail and that they take a high amount of willpower.

Nice

>you can't get more literary than
Mishima's grand finale?

>A gorillion kalpas into everything-is-fucked-forever-and-there's-absolutely-nothing-you-can-do and he gives you this face.

this

I don't get how they could unashamedly/un-self-awarely have these philosophies under the aegis of Nietzsche (yes, yes, sounds edgy)

Nietzsche pretty much wrecked existential nihilists who use the meaninglessness of the universe as a justification for misery/self-pity/the will to destroy life.

>I think the younger a suicide is the more noble and aesthetic it is.
How do you feel about complete, but purely literary suicides.

What a wacky guy

>Suicides can fail
If at first you don't succeed...

>They take a high amount of willpower
Geez. You'd think that guys who were willing to force themselves to keep thinking about such unpleasant possibilities would have at least a wee bit of gusto. I don't buy this one either.

Not really. For many people Nietzsche is just bro-philosophy intended to make you hit the gym, bang chicks and continue being a life-loving degenerate because you lack the necessary virtues (virginity, self-hatred, etc) to become the true ubermensch. Nietzsche is propaganda for normies who lack the capacity to comprehend nuance.

/thread.

mishimia is a fucking child
mainlander's philosophy paints the universe as the decaying body of God following His suicide. According to him we are as worms and maggots feasting in His Holy Corpse. He posits that the best course of action is to follow in the footsteps of God and destroy oneself in an attempt to return to nothingness.

kek

Worth reading?

>>you can't get more LARP than
>Mishima's grand finale?

Fixed.

The first 100 pages are worth reading for sure, but then it tails off into Jewish shit and the Norman period.

I don't now but it seems to have a cult following convinced he is the most important philosopher of the 21st century.

I get the feeling though his repeated use of the word 'nigger' might be something of a barrier to serious philosophical consideration.

delete this you philistine pig

>mainlander's philosophy paints the universe as the decaying body of God following His suicide. According to him we are as worms and maggots feasting in His Holy Corpse. He posits that the best course of action is to follow in the footsteps of God and destroy oneself in an attempt to return to nothingness.

I just started reading Ligotti's Conspiracy and this guy sounds fucking nuts. I hope it gets translated some day along with Zapffe's other work. It seems like Zapffe had a chance to get translated whenever his work was being considered in line with the new school of deep ecological thinkers like Arne Naess, but that chance passed 20 years ago.

Top tier reading of Nietzche. When's you published works going to be released, before or after suicide?

>God destroyed himself in an attempt to return to nothingness

This is an absurd claim for ANY conception of God. Mainländer is little more than a pessimist sophist without the intellectual rigor that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc. had

During m8

What do you guys recommend reading from Cioran? I picked up a copy of The Trouble with Being Born from a thrift place awhile back, and while I like it, it doesn't really seem to be meant to be read front to back. I usually just end up pulling it off the shelf at different times, reading a few of the aphorisms, and sticking it back for later. Is all of his work like this, or does he have something a bit more cohesively structured to be read in a typical front to back manner?

>If at first you don't succeed...
... you might permanently injure yourself in a way that will make it hard or impossible for you to try again or possibly, depending on where you live, become forcibly hospitalized
>force themselves to keep thinking about such unpleasant possibilities
People don't have to 'force' themselves to think negative thoughts. Go to /r9k/ and tell me that you seriously think that people who hate everything about life have to have the willpower to shower, let alone kill themselves.

Reminder that people who kill themselves are only the people who do not believe that they can endure a few years of suffering before their certain death, because they do not believe that there is nothing after after death.

>No one who kills themselves thinks there is life after death

What an incredibly retarded statement

bonmp