Pessimism

BOO HOO! Life is Suffering 🤣🤣🤣

“Our current crop of nihilists are at least as attenuated as their forebears, but they lack even the redeeming Romantic grandeur. They are as guilty as any Christian, as preening as any liberal moralist and as inhibited as any repressed virgin. The nihilist/pessimist Neo-Passéist will, for example, proclaim the need to end the human race to ‘save the planet,’ not realizing the extent of their own ego projection. Distanced and divorced from the universe, they deny their affinity with empty space while exalting themselves in a self-enclosed bubble. This clot of mentation they alternately dread and worship. These mechanists, tedious as any Redemptionist, haunted by the demon of consciousness, are hopelessly incapable of art. Neo-Decadence, arising from garbage heaps of tragic absurdity, refuses the easy lure of tragedy.”
— Against Neo-Passéism (2020)

“DIE PHILOSOPHIE DER ERLÖSUNG (‘The Philosophy of Redemption/Salvation’) is the principle work of 19th century German philosopher Philipp Mainländer, a variation on Schopenhauerian pessimism, in which the will-to-die underlies the ‘ultimate morality of non-being.’ Mainländer would conclude this work by hanging himself.

The title of the work is striking, as is the title of ‘The Last Messiah,’ Peter Wessel Zapffe’s pioneering essay on voluntary human extinction—in which the Norwegian philosopher argues that most of human life is spent on attempts to sublimate ‘a damaging surplus of consciousness,’ and that an end to reproduction is the only lasting solution.

It’s difficult not to be struck by how these titular concepts of redemption, salvation and a messianic conclusion to the human race (however negative) are deeply inscribed with late stage Christian morality and metaphysics. Is this a coincidence? It might be illuminating to recall some of Nietzsche’s epithets for Mainländer: ‘the old maid’ and ‘the sickly sentimental apostle of virginity.’

However ironic Mainländer and Zapffe intended their references to salvation and messiahs to be, it’s difficult not to think that Nietzsche perceived their projects accurately: as late-stage curdlings of Christian sentimentality and a ‘virginal’ or ascetic approach to existence. After the historical decay of monotheism into atheism—the progress from ‘one to none’—is it so difficult to posit a corresponding evolution of ‘salvation’ from a positive eternity into one of ultimate nothingness? A simple switch of the Neoplatonic ‘metaphysics of presence’ results in a metaphysics of transcendental absence, in which ‘non-being is the supreme principle of morality,’ the refuge of those tormented by consciousness, which here takes the place of original sin as the ineradicable human defect.

In the 21st century, who are the descendants of these ‘sickly sentimental apostles of virginity,’ the darkly-inverted apostates of life concealing their sclerotic Christianity beneath a grim façade of ‘realistic’ despair, or ‘compassion’ for the plight of the suffering human organism? In his essay ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle,’ Mark Fisher remarked:

The solution was already there – in the Christian Church...all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way.

Fisher associated this ultimate degenerate mutation of Christian values with the perverse ‘compassion’ of competitive virtue signaling Twitter users in the 21st century. We assert that, while this assessment is undeniably accurate, modern pessimists, antinatalists and voluntary human extinction advocates form an equally large component of the current ‘worse than Christian’ contingent. After all, superficially-agitated wokeness and pessimism often go hand in hand. It’s not such a difficult step to extend a terminally joyless and self-loathing worldview into an indictment of human life in general and, finally, human consciousness itself, until we are left only with the ‘virtue’ and ‘ultimate morality’ of non-being, sterility, extinction.

The (now lamentably deceased) arch-Catholic dandy Mark Samuels has remarked that Thomas Ligotti’s metaphysical stance on the intrinsic malevolence of conscious existence could only have come from a lapsed Catholic. Ligotti and philosophical academic David Benatar both retain the ‘transgressive’ element of disdaining life while attempting the difficult trick of simultaneously coming off as more ethical and sensitive than their opponents (this is a sleight of hand Nietzsche would have identified as a standard Christian tactic). Many similar well-educated, pessimistic adults have considerable running water, health insurance and tenured university positions.

Many, like Benatar, are vegan or vegetarian, yet they seem unwilling to extend their focus on the suffering of conscious existence to the animal kingdom; presumably the lower mammalian orders, like veritable lower classes, must be denied the true exquisite vintage suffering of the pessimistic human mind. Perhaps it is for this reason that they do not suggest driving cats and dogs into extinction to relieve the burden of their awareness with some sort of feline or canine concentration camp (the animals, presumably, must save themselves from themselves, although their pesky tendency to keep reproducing unless interfered with seems likely to ward off any potential messianic tendencies).

Just as Neo-Decadence is not meliorative, redemptive or progressive in the generally accepted sense, neither is it pessimist. We find most apocalyptic and post-human scenarios to be naïve at best, and the buried transcendentalist death wishes of the nervously-afflicted to be eminently less than convincing. Note that ‘pessimism' and ‘passéism’ sound very similar when casually spoken aloud—so similar that it is easy to mistake one for the other. This would not seem to be a coincidence. Pessimistic asceticism—pious withdrawal, terror of consciousness—is the unglamorous philosophy of our modern ‘sentimental death apostles.’”
— Justin Isis

“If, for the sake of brevity, we were to reduce philosophical Pessimism to a few core arguments, we could say that life is meaningless and its baseline is suffering, a condition made worse by the fact humans developed a consciousness that allows us to reflect on our own futility and dread mortality—and anything that says otherwise is but a comforting illusion.

Pessimism initially seduced me with its apparent clarity and gravitas. On the surface those core arguments rang true, and it took years of further examination to understand they represent only a fraction of the whole. It is unbelievably easy to mistake a partial truth for absolute certainty, and for what once was clarity to become dogmatic. Though the following words from the late Mark Samuels refer to an entirely different context, they strike me as fitting: ‘I had locked myself into a prison cell with nothing but the darkness I had come to love. I knew everything that could be known, because it was everything I had chosen to know.’ (May it be said, Mark fortunately found his way out from that cell, long before his unfortunate passing.)

Suffering, while universal, does not represent the totality of experience. To claim it outweighs all the positives assumes that they can be measured objectively, and tallied over in a ledger as if it was a system of credits and debits. The spectrum of sensations and their impact on each person is nuanced and varied: what I might register as profound and crippling suffering, another might experience as merely a manageable nuisance; a joyful moment might bring significant sense of well-being for one person, while for me it could represent only a fleetingly pleasant happenstance. Any attempt to regard these experiences as equal undervalues them and their impact.

Pessimism can also become a trap, a self-fulfilling prophecy dooming one to inaction: if I believe that nothing I do matters and any improvement is impossible, the motivation to strive for betterment becomes sallow and withers. In truth, through our own actions we can prevent suffering and foster happiness not just in ourselves but in others. Even in bleak circumstances, humans are known to cultivate joy: we will always find music in war zones, jokes in overwhelmed intensive care units, empathy in scenarios resulting in mass death, and ordinary people choosing kindness in a world that hands them every excuse not to.

At first glance, Neo-Decadence and Pessimism might seem antithetical, yet both share a similar sense of disillusionment: both strip away comforting illusions of meaning and progress, both reject nostalgia, sustainability, and authenticity as outmoded ideals. But whereas Pessimism prescribes ascetic renunciation or ways to distract, ignore, anchor, or sublimate these bleak insights, Neo-Decadence chooses to deliberately engage them: it does not try to solve suffering or avoid death, it makes these facts central to its aesthetic; it does not ignore suffering, it amplifies it to make it visible and give it form; it does not repress awareness of mortality, it turns it into a ceremonial embrace; it reframes the endless cycle of unfulfillment as a pilgrimage where each yearning becomes a beacon pointing towards the edges of existence where new visions emerge. Pessimism demands final and definitive judgments, while Neo-Decadence refuses closure: narratives fray, dialogues stall, melodies disintegrate mid-phrase.

With its aestheticization of decay, its rejection of authenticity, its embrace of impermanence, its preference for artifice, Neo-Decadence engages Pessimism as in a musical call-and-response dialog: if existence is futile, we can revel in its ruins; if consciousness is a disease, we surrender to its fever-induced deliriums; if the cosmos offers no ultimate justification, if life is but a complex arrangement of matter with the single goal of dissipating energy, then meaning and purpose can only be deliberately created. Neo-Decadence does not deny (how could it?) that life is filled with suffering, death is inevitable, and traditional sources of meaning tilt towards comforting illusion, but it recognizes that to fixate on these grim partial truths and allow them to dictate our existence is to embrace an uninspired conformity.

And yet the Ligottian Conspiracy looms aloft: Neo-Decadence could be just another cog in the vast machinery we unwittingly created that distracts me from pain, suffering, and the horror of being...and I do not have a rebuttal for that. But perhaps to Zapffe’s list of mechanisms to cope with reality we can add one: resilience. Neo-Decadence is not distraction nor sublimation, but rather a conscious participation in the cosmic drama of creation and destruction on its own terms, with its own garments, its own soundtrack, its own dance moves. It is an apostatic and aesthetic defiance for those too lucid for optimism and too fiery for despair.

But what the hell, let’s dance,

It may not be pretty but it’s worth a second glance.

—Alan Moore, ‘another suburban romance’”
— Ramon Alanis

“Although one can find numerous antecedents of pessimism pre-19th-century, such as the concept of duhkha in the Eastern religions, the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Holy Bible, or the teachings of Hegesias of Cyrene (who was wisely banned from teaching in Alexandria by the prudent King Ptolemy II Philadelphus), it’s generally agreed that much of what we today classify as Pessimism can be traced to Schopenhauer, who, unsurprisingly, was German…well, what else can you expect from a country that also inflicted on the world the Protestant Reformation, the Nazi Party, and Tokio Hotel?

Having written out at some length my dominant thoughts on the matter of Pessimism elsewhere, years later I find I don’t have a great deal of new things to say about the subject (and indeed, better minds than my own have argued to death the pros and cons of the philosophy at hand). I also do not wish to come down too hard on the topic, as a number of my favorite writers were/are of a pessimistic bent, and in terms of the manifold seasonings of philosophy I would argue that Pessimism is certainly a more pungent spice than Cynicism (that province of long-dead Romans), but at the same time not as in-your-face and obvious a flavoring ingredient as nihilism (as extolled by imperial murder harlequins with god delusions, missionaries of a World of Ruin, and paradoxical architects of monuments to Non-Existence). I’ve long felt that nihilism is to philosophy what pornography is to erotica, and to some extent perhaps the same thing may be said about pessimism. For in all actuality there is a certain undeniable funereal sexiness to Pessimism, and the horror writer who lurks within me (and I must stress there are many types of writers within me, not just one; but as it is the days of my black books are over, for no longer shall I be the Mouth of Sauron for the Outsiders of Universe B, and no longer shall I quarry stone for their Wormwood Palace) can admire the morbidly abject poetical passages in, say, Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, wherein he describes human beings as ‘hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones,’ classifies our lives as ‘…the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue,’ and claims that the concept of the Self is nothing more than a ‘spectral tapeworm.’ It’s telling, I think, that in the arena that is the pop culture zeitgeist, these days when many people think of the face of pessimism the mind’s eye conjures not the Ludwig Von Koopa-haired Arthur Schopenhauer or the Eraserhead-coifed Emil Cioran (it’s an axiom of nature that if one is a Philosophical Pessimist, one must therefore also sport a ghastly hairdo, perhaps as some form of divine punishment for their rejection of God’s creation), but instead the good-looking visage of Rust Cohle, as portrayed by Matthew McConaughey on the first season of True Detective. Somewhere along the line, Pessimism has discovered the value of good PR and marketing, though one senses (doomscrolling on social media aside) that perhaps its fifteen minutes of fame has reached its last gasping seconds; going by the philosophy books that I see selling at my place of employment, it would seem that Stoicism (especially the version of it as exalted by Marcus Aurelius) is currently the pop philosophical movement that is enjoying its Taylor Swift Eras Tour moment.

Another reason why I do not wish to expend too much bile on Pessimism is because I myself am at times of a pessimistic nature, and though I am a self-styled Medievalist, I do not extend that affectation into the realm of the flagellants. Actually, I would like to emendate the above sentence: like J.-K. Huysmans I’m more along the lines of a spiritual pessimist, and I think that is the key point, in that my pessimism is tempered by my spirituality, and is thus kept in check. This is something that Huysmans once touched upon in his novel EN ROUTE, when his main character (and author surrogate) Durtal reflects on his gradual disenfranchisement with Schopenhauer (in particular) and pessimism (in general): ‘Then I understood that pessimism was, at best, good for comforting people who had no real need to be consoled; I understood that its theories, alluring when one is young and rich and in good health, become singularly weak and lamentably false when one advances in age, when infirmities declare themselves, when everything collapses. I went to the hospital of souls, to the Church. They receive you there at least, they give you a bed and they care for you; they don’t, as the clinic of Pessimism does, merely tell you the name of the disease from which you suffer and turn their back on you.’ Understand that I am not saying that religion is the only thing capable of neutralizing the poison of pessimism; in practice, I think almost any spiritual belief system or practice (orthodox or otherwise) that extends the Self beyond its fleshy horizon and into numinous realms of the divine empyreal is the best argument against the limited nature and ultimate shallowness of pessimism.

For Pessimism is a philosophy that almost no one, even its most diehard acolytes, can fully adhere to, as even Ligotti has confessed (‘Pessimism is a set of ideals that no one can follow to the letter’). On that note, consider again the question of Cioran. This lachrymose Romanian aphorist spilled reams of ink lamenting his existence, poetically expressed his desired state to die totally unknown, penned entire books cursing the very act of creation itself, but all this does is make one wonder: why bother writing and publishing books, then? Isn’t that in and of itself an act of creation all but guaranteed to make sure that people didn’t forget about him? If he had truly wanted to fade away into history, wouldn’t it have made more sense to just keep his big fat yap shut? Either he was an arch-hypocrite, or he had never bothered to read that exemplar of wisdom literature anonymously composed in the New Kingdom’s Nineteenth (or Ramesside) Dynasty, Be a Writer, which not only praised the noble profession of scribes, but also identified writing as the road to immortality: ‘Be a writer, take it to heart, so that your name will fare likewise. A book is more effective than a carved tombstone or a permanent sepulchre. They serve as chapels and mausolea in the mind of him who proclaims their names. A name on people’s lips will surely be effective in the afterlife! Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader.’ The pessimist writer publically advocates for non-existence, but in their heart of hearts, they privately glutton themselves on the apples of Iðunn and bow before the altar of immortality, which they (like most people) crave.

In sum, when I think of pessimism these days I am reminded of the false front architecture of western ghost towns, darkly beautiful and macabre facades that dazzle the eye to the fact that, when one looks past their atmospheric veneer, one sees that there’s almost nothing substantial behind them, just a secular Buddhist shell game, Hot Topic Goth Gnosticism, Munch’s The Scream with false tits and beauty filters.”
— James Champagne

“I am a former antinatalist. ‘Former’ for two simple reasons: antinatalism is diet eugenics and utopia is much further in reach than a world where humanity consents to exterminating itself in an era where genocide is livestreamed. Antinatalism is the dour cousin of anarcho-primitivism: as anarcho-primitivism covers its ears in la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you when confronted by the efficacy of advanced technology in staving or reversing course with environmental degradation, so, too, does antinatalism do so when confronted with the fact that the majority of citations to support its arguments can be, quite easily, remedied even by reformist social and material reorganization. Schopenhauer is its King Ludd. The troglodyte empathy makes its acolyte profoundly, aesthetically disgusted by the sight of pregnant women. The only pessimist worth his—yes, always a his—salt is a hilarious individual, more of an absurdist by definition; for, if life is a joke, why not laugh? Rather, you must.”
— Colby Smith // YUUGENPRAXIS

“To misquote Poe, ‘Pessimism is not of Germany, but of the soul.’ There is a solution: do cocaine and ketamine at the same time.”
— Efron Hirsch

art by Aaron Lange

(WOUND OF WOUNDS, the E.M. Cioran tribute anthology from Mt. Abraxas Press, 2017, containing stories from Damian Murphy, Justin Isis, Adam S. Cantwell, D.P. Watt and other Neo-Decadent writers)