The Pessimist Is An Imperfect Pessimist by Carlo Michelstaedter

Life is will-to-live, will is a lack, lack is pain, all life is pain.

But everything that lives, believes to be alive and to have life; and pain is mute and continuous for all things so they don't call it pain - they call pain the revelations of the non-essence of their believed possession, the loss of what they believed to possess. So her pain is also said according to the same illusion: she complains that she can't complain in advance like she used to in relation with that thing, since that complaining is called enjoyment. She laments the loss of a thing, not its ability to be lost: The unreality of its possession. And in order to live she turns back to new things similar to those that have expired, and from that apparent possession she feeds herself, still suffering obscurely.

But he who truly wants life rejects living in relation to things that make the vain happiness and the vain pain of the others - and not being satisfied with an illusory possession, demand true possession, so that it may take shape and reveal all the dark and mute sufferings that in him take place. His life is the refusal and the struggle against all the temptations of illusory fulfillments, and not dispersing himself in the act of continuous correlations (illusory possessions) he affirms himself and takes shape and creates himself: this is art.

Art is therefore the strongest pain and the strongest life and gives the strongest joy in the affirmation of itself.

But those artists who can not bear all the weight of pain and take joy and life from this weight, but ask from life things like rewards and joy - those are the shameless: the men who come out on the street undressed.- In them the disillusionment, the pain, does not take life and form by itself by telling everyone the happy gospel of "health"; but because of its weakening, because of its request for relief and reward for the things of the way, each step is darkened and renewed with regard to everything. They give us the image of torment, the materiality of sorrows, of disillusionments, not the life of disillusionment, the voice of health and truth.

But as men do not understand more than what they in their materiality materially feel:  these imperfect artists, imperfect sorrowful souls, imperfect pessimists, are commonly called the poets of pain: the "pessimists".

In fact, men call pain not their continuous pain, which is life which they call joy, but these individual pains. The revelation of continual pain can only be done by those who do not adapt to it, continuing to delude themselves into other things, but take the person of this pain in act: in order for the true activity that leads to health, to inertia - [through activity towards peace] [originally in Greek].

The true pessimists are [Energetic] [word originally in Greek] in their pain, so they are healthy: id est they go towards health; the others are inert in pain, they want to rest, so they are sick: they gravitate towards "madness". They congratulate themselves for their life, educating themselves in their pains, taking from their wounds the person they are exposing to others with no purpose other than their "vanity". Going back to each section to see the profile itself in the shadow are "caught by vertigo".

True pessimists: Christ, Aeschylus, Ibsen, Beethoven, Petrarch, Parmenides. 

Imperfect pessimist: Lenau, Schumann, Amiel, etc.

A Young Man by Carlo Michelstaedter

The following is a short story by Carlo Michelstaedter:

A young man, educated in a religious college, is educated by how much he knows of rebellion towards human law and matures his brain in speculations about the human psyche and the mysteries of nature. He sees too much and in his bitter mood that fountain of feeling dries up. He feels it and he experiences pain, and so he, because of it, wants to throw himself into life in order to stimulate the paralyzed fibers of his mood with the strongest of sensations. And he does so. But he cannot recover his lost spontaneity and he realizes that all his enthusiasms are fictitious, he realizes tat they are always the same. And with the usual cruel honesty towards himself, he examines his own self, analyzing it and then, with a calm and reasoned resolution, he kills himself, thus restitutioning the energies that were uselessly fighting in him to Mother Earth.

Very likely a metaphor for his own life, Michelstaedter would go on to write his book Persuasion And Rhetoric, a bleak philosophical treatise in the Schopenhauerian tradition. He would deliver the book as his dissertation, killing himself with a firearm immediately after, without even bothering to defend his thesis.

Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios

Kítrinos, Ton and Emfýlios, three hack philosophers from ancient Greece, find themselves in the year 2019. After catching up with the following millennia of philosophy, they find themselves in a state of deep confusion...

Emfýlios: The answer seems clear in this accursed age: Believe nothing, believe not even the seemingly obvious truth.

Kítrinos: Then are we not following the metanarrative of skepticism?

Emfýlios: Perhaps... but we will be the least metanarrative followers among men, and thus as wise as one can be.

Kítrinos: Can we even have ethics beyond the pleasure principle? Utilitarianism is flawed because it just projects what you thinks is good onto everyone we can cover basic needs, but desire is complex... so all we can do is let people do what they want...equally.

Ton: Well if you choose a different set of ethics you are projecting that set  onto people, based on you thinking that those ethics is correct.Utilitarianism, in practice, will never be 100% correct, but I think it's already by far the most useful and accurate ethical theory that the modern man has come up with.

Kítrinos: But how would you apply utilitarianism to a masochist?

Ton: I don't know, this question is, perhaps, unanswerable.

Emfýlios: Negative Utilitarianism, however, can answer this question just fine: You should probably not torture the masochist if he no longer wants to be tortured.

Kítrinos: We need to deconstruct the pleasure/pain dichotomy...

Ton: At this point, we don't know what ethics really are. Or if it's anything at all!

Emfýlios: ETHICS ARE A METANARRATIVE.

Kítrinos: Your mother is a metanarrative! And she sodomizes goats.

Ton: Well, that's the one thing we know that ethics are...

Kítrinos: Can there be unknown unknowns if I know I don't know everything?

Everyone:...

Ton: Perhaps... You don't know the scope and significance of the unknown unknowns? Having read Thomas Ligotti, I must say I agree completely that human psychology directly and contradicts any sort of completely accurate self-awareness or perception.
Emfýlios: Why, of course! We specifically evolved to not be accurately self-aware. The same we evolved to breed and nothing else, which is to say, you did not evolve to be happy after you procreate, only to think that the act of procreation will bring you happiness.
Kítrinos: Nature is our stepping stone. Well, that and the language that precedes us.
Emfýlios: Nature itself must be destroyed if we are to solve this problem. Someone grab a torch, I'm going to do it!
Kítrinos: Nature is... an anchoring? In the Zapffian sense? From which you can later detach and reattach to something else. But you won't get anywhere without taking the first step.
Ton: Nicely put about evolution Emfýlios, but I must ask, what is being "accurately self-aware". Would being accurately self-aware just be not being aware at all?
Emfýlios: Good question, bad answer... What would it be?
Ton: I mean, evolution constructed all meaning for us, or so say many people, but I see this as pure delusion, perhaps even a deliberate fabrication. I don't think there's any awareness, or that hypothetical awareness would be completely empty, motionless and unchanging, nihilistic, for anything else would be fabricated meaning.
Kítrinos: And those meanings are anchorings.
Emfýlios: Perhaps accurately self-awareness is nothing but an acute awareness of oneself without the four remedies for life [Zapffe] that give "meaning" to our lives.
Ton: I guess that's an accurate, but certainly it entails severe despair?
Kítrinos: Rather, it's a point from where you anchor everything else, like an axiom.

The three philosophers are stuck in a state of aporia.

Rhetoric and Crucifixation (Tragic Pyrrhonism Pt.1)

Let us imagine a narrative, any narrative, whether that be communism, Nazism, nationalism of any kind, any political stance, any narrative whatsoever, regardless of its truth and falsifiability.
Let us imagine a cross, it's bloody timber and the holes caused by the nailing...

I know an individual, who goes by ze/zir pronouns. Ze is a communist (a Marxist-Leninist, if I am not mistaken), anti-family, anti-childhood, anti-age of consent, anti-gender and so on. While this person is real, it is hard to not think of zir as being sort of emblematic of the so-called "internet leftist".

Let's call this narrative, or this amalgamation of narratives, cross #1.

Before this, ze was a white nationalist.

Let's call this second narrative cross #2.

We do not control our own beliefs. Because of the way time works, we never "are", rather, we are always becoming. So we are always crushed between who we were (a white nationalist) and who we are becoming (a communist). When we reflect upon who we have become, we will see a multitude of people (a multitude of crosses...): Our "younger self" as effectively died, as will our "young adult self" and our "adult self", until our "old self" suffers a more literal death.

Think about the suffering this can cause. Any look at the average white nationalist will notice that these people are unhappy, constantly complaining about this and that, of the degeneracy of the world, of the multitude of imaginary conspiracies that they need to anchor themselves to in order to not fall in the black hole of despair.

Likewise, changing ("dying") from a white nationalist to a communist can cause quite a lot of suffering as well: One has to completely reinvent oneself, to admit their wrongness completely, to see what they thought of as truth as being repulsive. Perhaps this would be nothing if we were completely rational creatures, but we are not: We associate what we think is the truth (narratives) with our own identities. To change this radically is to effectively commit metaphysical suicide.

And now communism causes them the same sufferings.

I hope the message is clear: We do not carry our cross. Instead we are crucified on our own narratives, and when we think we have "figured it out", when we change narratives radically, we merely change crosses, we go from Cross #1 to Cross #2, but we are crucified on our own rhetoric all the same and thus suffer all the same.

We are either this way, or we are not at all...

Reflections on God and religion

Jesus Christ must have been a psychopath -Peter Wessel Zapffe

Why should God continue to care for us? Is it not with the utmost hubris that the so called "humble" Christians continue to think that God would even want to care for us for this long? If history repeats, it only follows that God would soon tire of us.

The idea that an omnipotent, sentient being could spend millennia doing nothing without committing suicide breaks one from any religion. Either God is so alien to us as to be irrelevant, or we are arrogant to assume we are special to him in any way and not just one of his countless creations, no different than a pebble.

Mankind is born into the sufferings of the world, and is then cast into the fiery pits of Hell for eternal suffering as it cannot reach redemption in this world. Why then, do the Christians continue the cycle of endless suffering, even as they claim to reject all the things of this world?

Satan would have never have casted anyone into the pits if everyone's father and mother didn't hand the sufferers from their mothers' womb straight into the claws of the Devil.

What God likes is that not of this world, his own kingdom rests in another world. What Satan adores, however, is present in every facet of human nature and behavior. How arrogant are the Christians then, in thinking that God would want anything to do with a species like us! God would be far fonder of oysters, those harmless, quiet, unmoving beings, than he would ever be of us!

If humans are a reflection of their Creator, it only follows that God was in immense suffering... or inflicting immense suffering on another entity.

Julius Bahnsen and I Have A Special Plan For This World: No Escape.

When everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
When everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
When all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
As by a shining brainless beacon
Or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world
When you are calm and joyful
And finally entirely alone
Then in a great new darkness
You will finally execute your special plan

I have recently finished reading two of the shorter works by one Julius Bahnsen, one of the three main representatives of German Idealist Pessimism during the 19th century, the other two being Edward Von Hartmann and Philipp Mainlander, Bahnsen being by far the most obscure of these three thinkers. In these readings, I have found several similarities to Thomas Ligotti's disturbing poem I Have A Special Plan For This World.

In Bahsen's thought, which could be accurately described as absolute, unrelenting pessimism, there is no possible redemption or salvation from this world (as opposed to Schopenhauer, who advised either asceticism or a calm contemplation of art, or Mainlander, who thought universal redemption was inevitable because of entropy through some very clever readings of his contemporary physicians, namely Boltzmann). Likewise, he thought that any attempts at reaching redemption from existence are doomed and delusional from the beginning. "Redemption from existence" is exactly the "plan" of the narrator:

Imagine he said all the flesh that is eaten

Man is a self-conscious nothing.

The teeth tearing into it
The tongue tasting it's flavor
And the hunger for that taste
Now take away that flesh he said
Take away the teeth and the tongue
The taste and the hunger
Take away everything as it is
That was my plan
My own special plan for this world
I listened to these words and yet I did not wonder
If this creature whom I had thought sleeping or dead would ever approach his vision
Even in his deepest dreams
Or his most lasting death
Because I had heard of such plans such visions
And I knew they did not see far enough
But what was demanded in a way of a plan
Needed to go beyond tongue and teeth and hunger and flesh
Beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away
And so I began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night
And a strangely shining light
That owed nothing to the light of day

The narrator seems to think that all existence is a grind, from the line: "Once more we are mangled by a great grinding fear". The wording here, grinding, is particularly reminiscent of Bahnsen's epitaph "Vita mea irritus labor", latin for "My life was pointless work". 

Likewise, the following verse has several Bahnsean elements in it:

There are no means for escaping this world

It penetrates even into your sleep

And is his substance

You are caught in your own dreaming

Where there is no space

And a hell forever where there is no time

You can't do nothing you aren't told to do

There is no hope for escape from this dream

"There are no means to escaping this world / It penetrates into your sleep" Is a very Bahnsean notion. There is no means to escape the horrible suffering of existence because of the principle of contradiction, which is to say, Bahnsen says that there was not one single, "cosmic" Will like Schopenhauer thought, but rather, every individual had several Wills in himself, the Will to do something, and these Wills contradicted each other, thus making the individual forever miserable since his desires are always contradicting each other. Thus, even in sleep, there is no escape from existence. Likewise, it's interesting that Bahsen thought that there would never be a sort of escape from existence, and it would just continue on forever. Life is just a nightmare for him, and this imagery seems quite like his ideas. One would be remiss to not mention Alfred Kubin's novel The Other Side, which took influence from Bahnsen as well as Mainlander.

The entire verse about "designs upon this world" applies as well: Just like Mainlander, Bahnsen disagreed with the leftists who thought that existence was fundamentally good, it was just made into suffering by this or that entity. For Bahnsen, no revolution, no utopia would relieve us from suffering, not because revolutions or utopias are impossible, but because the problem relies on existence itself. Reality itself is ontologically painful, and thus, neither right-wing nor left-wing "solutions" would fix Humanity's suffering.

he verse about "the funny man" might as well be about Bahnsen too, thought it is likely a reference to John Doe from Ligotti's story The Frolic: Bahnsen believed that it was humor that it was "in possession of the correct ethical metric" because it was only humor that could simultaneously relieve tension and suffering and acknowledge existence (which is to say, the "being" of whatever grotesque thing is the subject of the comedy) as being nightmarish. Referring to the man, his walk and his plan seems to coincide with this. 

Finally, at the very end, the first verse is repeated, only broken, somewhat depressed, melancholically... This repetition, for me, always indicated that the "special plan" would never come to fruition, it's just a fantasy that the narrator holds to endure the constant grinding, and at the end, perhaps he realizes this, somewhat like how the narrator from The Bungalow House knows his maxim in a way he never did before. All hopes of fixing this universe are ultimately doomed, for the narrator dreams of an utopia of non-being, but he dreams of an utopia all the same, a place where there are no more contradictions, and like Bahnsen said: "The world is an inextricable tangle of contradictions of the most tragic negativity."

No More Philosophers.

No more Plato, he's in the world of forms now.
No more Epicurus, no more pain or pleasure now.
No more Seneca, at least he didn't cry though.
No more Mainlander, dead as his God, hanging from the noose.
No more Bahnsen, at least there's no more suffering that way.
No more Michelstaedter, crucified on rhetoric no more.
No more Zapffe, no Last Messiah being buried in the fingernails of midwives and pacifier makers.
No more Spengler, oh well, at least he won't have to see no decline.
No more Cioran, didn't even remember who he was.
No more Schopenhauer, but I guess it's better that way.
No more Leopardi, as sick of life as he was of health.
No more Kierkegaard, together with his God at last, what a laugh.
No more Jean Amery, so sick of life he wrote a whole book about it.
No more Caraco, he missed his mommy too much, went straight after her.

My life is pointless work.