r/Pessimism • u/Affectionate_Total47 • 17d ago
Discussion Even Thomas Ligotti conflates philosophical pessimism with nihilism
As much as I admire Thomas Ligotti as a writer, I just can't get onboard with the notion that someone's commitment to philosophical pessimism is ultimately reducible to one's temperament. Ligotti sort of wavers between philosophical pessimism and nihilism. The two are most emphatically not the same. One is grounded in moral convictions motivated by honesty and actual experience, while the other is grounded in some nebulous academic position.
"Along with every other tendentious mindset, pessimism may be construed as a fluke of temperament, a shifty word that will just have to do until a better one comes along. Without the temperament that was given to them in large portion, pessimists would not see existence as basically undesirable. Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence is basically undesirable. If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply “Of course” before returning to their ecstasy. Why they should answer in this way is a closed book. The conclusions to which temperament lead an individual, whether or not they are conclusions refractory to those of world society, are simply not subject to analysis."
- The Conspiracy against the Human Race
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago
If by "antirealist," you mean to say that moral judgments have no objective foundation, then no, the philosophical pessimist is not an antirealist. The value judgment that non-existence is preferable to existence is grounded in empirical facts regarding objective reality.
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u/VesperNihil 17d ago
But that judgment is subjective. There are objective facts such as suffering, decay, etc, but the value judgment that these things are bad is a subjective judgment.
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago
Sight is "subjective" by that same standard. Is the tree any less real because my apprehension of its existence through sight is subjective? The pessimist doesn't see existence as both pointless and harmful because they believe it to be so; they believe it to be so because that's actually the way existence is objectively.
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u/VesperNihil 17d ago edited 17d ago
You're conflating an objective fact with a subjective evaluation of that fact. "Suffering exists" is an objective, empirical claim. "Suffering is bad" is a value judgment. The first doesn't logically entail the second. Sight isn't analogous because "I see a tree" can be objectively investigated as a process of perception. The fact that my perception is subjective doesn't make the existence of light or the process of vision subjective. And the fact that suffering has objective neurological and behavioral correlates doesn't make its badness an objective property. You'd still need to establish that "badness" exists independently of consciousness.
I'm a pessimist because I have determined that the existence of sufferings is unjustifiable. But I recognize that the universe does not care, and majority of humans do not care in the same way I do. We all have an aversion to suffering, but not everyone judges suffering as "bad." Many people argue that suffering is good for growth, which I disagree with, but that's kind of the point. Morality is a human construction. It's useful, but it is not a property of the universe in the same way "atoms" or "gravity" is.
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago
I would argue for a more nuanced perspective. Moral judgments regarding existence are not just groundless or untethered subjective phenomena. They're grounded in the objective as well as negative relationship between the human organism and the environment. It's an objective fact that human beings crave meaning in a meaningless cosmos. The value judgments are very much rooted in said relationship. One can easily discern that the relationship itself is objectively bad. The reason you've determined that suffering is unjustifiable is not because you subjectively determined that it was unjustifiable. No, you determined that suffering is unjustifiable because it's an object description of the dysfunctional relationship between yourself and the surrounding environment.
Given your position, the optimist is just as entitled to their own belief that existence is good. No, the optimist is delusional because their belief regarding existence doesn't correspond with the objective facts.
In short, value judgements only exist because they're ultimately rooted in objective phenomena. "Goodness" or "badness" are objective relationships; they don't need to exist in the exact same manner as trees. They're still both objective phenomena.
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u/Noise-of-the-Spheres 17d ago
Nihilism is anti-meaning, pessimism is anti-value. An optimistic nihilist may say life has no meaning, and that this is a good thing. A pessimistic non-nihilist may say the universe has meaning, and follow that we're slaves to that meaning. Ligotti is both.
Here Ligotti is not reducing pessimism to a temperament. He's steelmanning that argument before splitting the internal disposition one has towards one opinion or another, from the validity of the conclusion. The point of the section is that you can't disprove pessimism in this way.
Notice the difference between saying "may be construed" and saying "is".
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago edited 17d ago
I disagree that Ligotti is not reducing pessimism to temperament. He more or less says the same as the above (reread the portion regarding G.K. Chesterton as well as the discussion concerning Zapffe and the advent of consciousness) in the introduction to The Conspiracy. I also disagree that pessimism implies a commitment to non-value. According to philosophical pessimism, the highest value, the greatest good, is non-existence.
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u/Affectionate_Total47 16d ago
Here's another passage in conjunction with the original I posted which corroborates my claim:
"For thousands of years a debate has been going on in the shadowy background of human affairs. The issue to be resolved: “What should we say about being alive?” Overwhelmingly, people have said, “Being alive is all right.” More thoughtful persons have added, “Especially when you consider the alternative,” disclosing a jocularity as puzzling as it is macabre, since the alternative is here implied to be both disagreeable and, upon consideration, capable of making being alive seem more agreeable than it alternatively would, as if the alternative were only a possibility that may or may not come to pass, like getting the flu, rather than a looming inevitability. And yet this covertly portentous remark is perfectly well tolerated by anyone who says that being alive is all right. These individuals stand on one side of the debate. On the other side is an imperceptible minority of disputants. Their response to the question of what we should say about being alive will be neither positive nor equivocal. They may even fulminate about how objectionable it is to be alive, or spout off that to be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive, and so on. Now, there are really no incisive answers as to why anyone thinks or feels one way and not another. The most we can say is that the first group of people is composed of optimists, though they may not think of themselves as such, while the contending group, that imperceptible minority, is composed of pessimists. The latter know who they are. But which group is in the right—the existentially harrowed pessimists or the life-embracing optimists—will never be resolved."
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u/Moist-Friendship-840 17d ago
Nihilists in general lack any coherence.
An optimistic nihilist, or an absurdist, is someone obsessed with personal meaning. Their philosophy doesn't consider pain, suffering, and nature's apathy towards the living.
They say they're aware of nature's apathy but they're optimistic because then they can create their own meaning. That's just liberal cope and self centeredness.
What about the meaning of the Bangladeshi girl who works in a factory for starvation wages, and gets sexually abused near daily, or the calf eaten immediately after birth?
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u/Haline5 17d ago
I have said for a while that Camus or even Nietzschean philosophy is a philosophy of privilege. You are allowed the ability to find purpose in an absurd world where the vast majority of creatures are limited in doing so. Someone who is a slave is not going to be able to truly see their life through under these optimistic nihilist philosophies in most cases. This doesn’t even touch on the average sentient being, who is even less able and possibly more subjugated.
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u/Low-Bake8401 17d ago
Who's to say that privilege is necessarily a bad thing?
I'd say that a scientific stance of Existential Nihilism is formed logically, while Pessimism is ultimately a subjective value judgement.
It's claiming an ought from an is.
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u/ProjectPatMorita 17d ago
I don't see how you can really justify your statements here from a broader global view of humanity, given that the vast majority of the most brutally poor and oppressed peoples on earth are extremely religious and optimistic in their metaphysics.
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u/Haline5 17d ago
I don't think that contradicts what I'm saying. The fact that extremely poor and oppressed populations are often religious arguably illustrates the point rather than refutes it. Religion supplies meaning externally: suffering can have a purpose, injustice can eventually be corrected, death isn't necessarily the end, and one's circumstances can fit into a larger cosmic narrative.
Camus is asking you to stare directly at an indifferent universe, reject precisely those externally supplied meanings, and nevertheless construct enough personal meaning to affirm life. My point is that this project is considerably easier when you have the material security and autonomy necessary to actually construct a life around things you find meaningful.
A Bangladeshi factory worker being exploited for starvation wages may still love her family, practice her religion, experience happiness, and consider her life worthwhile. I'm not denying her agency or presuming to evaluate her life for her. I'm saying that telling someone subjected to extreme exploitation that she can overcome the absurd by freely creating her own meaning overlooks the fact that her available choices, time, security, and control over her own existence may be radically constrained.
So “many oppressed people are religious and optimistic” doesn't establish that Camusian meaning-making works equally well across material circumstances. If anything, the religious part raises an interesting question: why are we using reliance on a metaphysical framework Camus explicitly rejects as evidence for the universal viability of Camus's solution?
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u/yesimfinewhyyouask 15d ago
Made a post on absurdism sub about wtf would Camus say about how awesome is struggle, if he himself had chronic pains for life. Mods blocked the op.
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago
They're also just like optimists insofar as both typically agree that only a dead pessimist is a consistent pessimist.
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u/A1Dilettante 17d ago
Well OP let's start at the beginning of your argument here. How are you defining nihilism? Beyond it being "some nebulous academic position". I think if we can have a concrete idea of what you mean by nihilism, then we can all work out why exactly Ligotti conflates pessimism with nihilism, according to your claim.
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago
A good as well as conventional definition of nihilism is that it involves the repudiation of truth and / or moral claims insofar as neither is grounded in objective reality. In other words, if I as a philosophical pessimist insist that my own belief that non-existence is preferable to existence has more to do with my own individual temperament than it does with objective facts, then I'm on the nihilist end of the pessimism / nihilism spectrum.
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u/A1Dilettante 17d ago
Okay, I'm seeing two spectrums here. There's optimism/pessimism, then nihilism/antinihilism (or realism or objectivism or faith or whatever).
A pessimist has the belief that non-existence is preferable to existence. A optimist has the opposite belief.
Nihilism informs belief, as you believe Ligotti to, through temperament. Aka psychological disposition or beyond objective truth and reality. The pessimistic belief that non-existence is preferable is BASED on how pissy I feel about living. Not the objective fact that life is suffering.
Antinihilism (or realism, objectivism, faith, whatever) informs belief through objective truth or reality. The pessimistic belief that non-existence is preferable is not BASED on how pissy I feel about living but an objective fact that life is suffering.
Of course these are binaries and might not be the best framework to even analyze and interrogate Ligotti, but it's a start.
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago
We're on the same page. Much of what Ligotti says throughout CATHR suggests that there's no objective justification for the pessimist's belief that non-existence is preferable to existence. That was definitely not (for instance) Zapffe or Mainlander's belief.
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u/aha1982 17d ago
Pessimism is negative value. Nihilism is no value. These two positions are not the same.
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago
You're right. A lot of people here are apparently not aware of the distinction.
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u/FourthGroup 15d ago
When society refuses to follow well understood principles of life ... then pessimists and nihilists may emerge but in a sense everybody knows what the problem is.
They just refuse to name it.
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u/pokpokpokuytff 17d ago
He doesnt say anything about nichilism here, am i dumb?
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u/Affectionate_Total47 17d ago edited 17d ago
You're not dumb. There's a difference between arguing that the pessimist has a more accurate view of existence than the optimist and the notion that the pessimist is a pessimist ultimately because they're genetically predisposed to be a pessimist. Ligotti, based on what he writes in CATHR, is committed to the second position. It's a form of nihilism because it attempts to sidestep the idea of truth as correspondence to reality. Ligotti wants to say he agrees with Zapffe, but then he says it's ultimately "subjective." The pessimist has an accurate view of things and the optimist represses this truth - end of story. If you believe something, say it like you mean it.
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u/wildguitars 17d ago
He never claimed to be a nhilist, from what i remember he always said he is a pessimist