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"Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos stands condemned. The conscience of man must revolt against the gross immorality of nature."
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Philosophical pessimism"What does one do when one has a question that is so difficult to answer? One tactic employed particularly by analytic philosophers is to ignore the question altogether; to call it useless, ill-posed, or meaningless. But reducing the question to a linguistic dilemma is akin to a psychological defense mechanism where one does not want to face the underlying problem. And in doing so, curiously enough, the question of meaning is transferred from life itself to language, and in the field of language it is finally possible to pass sentence: there is no meaning (because the question is meaningless). In the end, according to certain philosophers, although it is true that we do not know if life has meaning, at least we do know that the question itself has no meaning. And knowing one thing is, they would say, better than knowing nothing. This analytical tactic can only convince those who already have a certain optimistic predisposition towards life. This is because to think or believe that a profoundly human longing (the longing for meaning) can be ignored is to think that the human being can live relatively well without knowing why they live. The teleological pessimist is, on the other hand, a pessimist who sees the lack of meaning in life as one of the great sources of suffering. And if it were true that the question cannot be answered or that there is no point in asking about the meaning of human life, then that would only exacerbate the sense of weltschmerz rather than appease ones inner torments."
Philosophical pessimism is the view that life and existence are of negative value. It is often expressed as the claim that life is not worth living and that non-existence would, at least in many cases, be preferable to coming into or remaining in existence. Other formulations focus on claims that suffering and other harms have more impact or severity than pleasure and other goods; that the amount
"Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos stands condemned. The conscience of man must revolt against the gross immorality of nature."
"Depression, angst, a refusal to eat, and so forth, are taken without exception to be marks of a pathological condition, and are treated accordingly. In many cases, however, these phenomena are indications of a deeper, more immediate experience of what life is all about, bitter fruits of the genius of the mind or emotion, which is at the root of every antibiological tendency. It is not the soul that is ill, but its defense mechanism that either fails or is abjured because it is considered—correctly—as a betrayal of mans most potent gift."
"Nobody has ever managed to explain what it is they are longing after in religion, but it is quite clear what they are trying to escape from – this earthly vale of tears, one’s untenable existential situation."
"Ah, now I understand! Senhor Vasques is Life; Life, monotonous and necessary, commanding and unknowable. This banal man represents the banality of life. On the surface he is everything to me, just as, on the surface, Life is everything to me. And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the fourth-floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is as monotonous as life itself, but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves, which is something beyond resolution."
"If there is no God to redeem suffering, and if there is no God to ensure that good triumphs over evil, the problem of existence poses itself anew. Is life really worth living if it contains more suffering than happiness, more evil than good, and if it promises no reward or redemption in some life to come?"
"The will must not only despise death, it must love it; for chastity is the love of death."