Philosophical Pessimism

"Finally, and perhaps most important, to the extent that the bad things in life really are necessary, our lives are worse than they would be if the bad things were not necessary. There are both real and conceivable beings in which nociceptive (that is, specialized neural) pathways detect and transmit noxious stimuli, resulting in avoidance without being mediated by pain. This is true of plants and simple animal organisms, and it is also true of the reflex arc in more complex animals, such as humans. We can also imagine beings much more rational than humans, in which nociception and aversive behavior were mediated by a rational faculty rather than a capacity to feel pain. In such beings, a noxious stimulus would be received but not felt (or at least not in the way pain is), and the rational faculty would, as reliably as pain, induce the being to withdraw. It would be much better to be that sort of being than to be our sort of being. It would similarly be better to be the sort of being who can appreciate the good things in life without having to experience bad things or without having to work really hard to attain the good things. Lives in which there is “no gain without pain” are much worse than lives in which there could be “the same gain without pain.”"

"Why does the Raven cry aloud and no eye pities her? Why fall the Sparrow & the Robin in the foodless winter? Faint! shivering they sit on leafless bush, or frozen stone Wearied with seeking food across the snowy waste; the little Heart, cold; and the little tongue consum'd, that once in thoughtless joy Gave songs of gratitude to waving corn fields round their nest. Why howl the Lion & the Wolf? why do they roam abroad? Deluded by summers heat they sport in enormous love And cast their young out to the hungry wilds & sandy desarts"

"Every night and every morn Some to misery are born; Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight; Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night."

"Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering."

"Nanda, I do not extol the production of a new existence even a little bit; nor do I extol the production of a new existence for even a moment. Why? The production of a new existence is suffering. For example, even a little [bit of] vomit stinks. In the same way, Nanda, the production of a new existence, even a little bit, even for a moment, is suffering. Therefore, Nanda, whatever comprises birth, [namely] the arising of matter, its subsistence, its growth, and its emergence, the arising, subsistence, growth, and emergence of feeling, conceptualization, conditioning forces, and consciousness, [all that] is suffering. Subsistence is illness. Growth is old age and death. Therefore, Nanda, what contentment is there for one who is in the mother’s womb wishing for existence?"

"Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o’er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be."

"The essence of life is suffering, said the Buddha. At first glance this statement seems exceedingly morbid and pessimistic. It even seems untrue. After all, there are plenty of times when we are happy. Aren’t there? No, there are not. It just seems that way. Take any moment when you feel really fulfilled and examine it closely. Down under the joy, you will find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension that no matter how great this moment is, it is going to end. No matter how much you just gained, you are inevitably either going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have and scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die; in the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory."

"Precisely because mortality and terminality are different things, jellyfish and other “immortal” beings that we find in nature are also terminal beings in my sense, as they are subject to the friction caused by their emergence. Ending through aging is just one of the forms that the terminal being takes. Even though the terminal being does not age, it is not circumvented; it adopts different forms. The problem, even with “eternal” organisms, is not that they will die, but the fact that they began. To begin is already to experience friction, to wear yourself out (naturally and socially, in the case of humans). Immortality will only manage to perpetuate attrition and terminality. If human life is characterized by discomfort, we don't have anything valuable enough to immortalize. The discourse about the terminal being could convey the idea that the solution is immortality, the non-ending of life. But even if a fairy appeared and bestowed immortality upon us, once we were born this would not solve the primordial ontological problem. After we have been born, immortality would be one more torture, an extension of the unwanted condition. Once we are born, it is better to die. If in this hypothetical immortality we were freed from pain, we would still have to face discouragement and moral impediment. Certainly, we would not be more ethical if we were immortal (we would be like the gods of paganism, eternally immoral)."

"Just as we do not perceive that the earth is in motion (to all intents and purposes, it seems to be perfectly still); just as we are unable to apprehend the gradual death of the planet, even though we are convinced of it by scientific arguments; just as we do not perceive the evolution of the species, even though we know that they are changing; just as we perceive matter as still and static, even though its entire molecular structure is in permanent motion; in the same way, we do not perceive the terminality of being in ordinary human behavior, and we see everything as stable and permanent. We see old and deteriorated matter (including aged humans) as always having been that way; we fail to perceive them as becoming, as having deteriorated and become old."

"These are huge, even colossal, temporal modules of the transition of all things toward their end, which—from our minuscule, singular, finite, and perspectival temporal module—make us see as static and permanent what is impregnated and corroded with temporality, fluidity, and terminality. It is as if being itself appeared while already hiding its decaying nature. The human mechanisms of concealing the terminality of being follow the concealing rhythm of being itself; every human tends to hide their terminal temporality and its frightening lack of value behind a slow and reassuring temporality. If we could grasp, even for an instant, the swift temporality of the terminal nature of being—like that mad scientist in Terence Fisher's The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), who ages and dies in a few seconds in front of the cameras—we would be horrified. We can endure the terminal nature of being only because it is given to us little by little, in a periodic temporality."

"Our "love for life" is always, in some way, unrequited love.... Life does not care about us; it does not even know about our particular circumstances. Contrary to what is said, life gives nothing for free, and everything we manage to obtain is snatched away from us. Life does not need us, but we chase after it, we humiliate ourselves, we beg and accept everything it makes us go through, even the greatest sufferings. Many are capable of the worst moral acts just to preserve their own lives a bit more.... To those who ask, "But, do you not love life?" we should answer, in a poetic way: "Of course I love life; I always did. I always wanted to live, but it is life that does not let me live, that limits me, that hurts me, that makes me ill and destroys me. It is not me who does not want to live, because life is everything I always wanted. I wanted to build things, but life demolished everything I built; I wanted to love others, but life killed everyone I loved. Do not say that I do not love life; it is life that does not love me, that does not love anybody.""

"It is not necessary to postulate an ideal, eternal and immutable world to “negatively” evaluate this life, ethically and sensibly. Indeed, human life can be seen as terrible without needing any comparison with a better or sublime “other life”, but simply by virtue of its sheer impact (or discomfort) value as it manifests itself in humans. If I'm being tortured, or imprisoned in a concentration camp, that's pretty bad for its impact value, not compared to an ideal situation in which it wouldn't be happening. Suffering is punctual and sinks its teeth into human skin. This world does not “let us down” (by having frustrated some sublime ideal), but, quite simply, hurts and humiliates us. Auschwitz isn't horrible because it's compared to a stroll down the Champs Élysées. It's just horrible. Any suffering is concentrated in a point of my existence that dispenses with any comparison with a “better world”."

"The fundamental fact of life that we need to understand is that human beings are able to desire intensely and unconditionally something that lacks value."

"We are not nihilistic towards life - it is life that is nihilistic towards us. It is life that denies us, expels us, and kills us. Do we not want to live intensely and forever? Are we the ones denying life? Is it not life that denies us day by day?"

"It is not morality that denies life - it is life that denies itself, that kills itself by killing us. Life is suicidal. We try to live intensely, but life, intensely, kills us. Life itself is skeptical - it doesn't believe in anything it creates. It creates only to destroy what it has created. It doesn't need nihilists to deny itself, nor does it need suicides to commit suicide. We suffer because we are part of life's suicide weapon, part of what it daily kills."

"This minority that remains tense, that is unable to get distracted, that cannot relax, that listens to others, that is moved by their stories, that maintains an acute sensitivity to the problems and sufferings of others - this minority is usually sick, even physically, like the Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's novel "The Idiot," who was capable of a sublime surrender to others only due to suffering from epilepsy. "Normal" people are laid-back and therefore insensitive and morally inconsiderate, those who yawn while their friend is telling them about their most terrible problems."

"Here, ordinary humans seem to teach the rare philosopher something: if you want to maintain your mental health and not be destroyed by the impacts of life, it is better to ignore than to know, to assume a callous, summary, and immoral way of living - not to take things too seriously, not to try to know anyone in depth, not to know too much about the world. Ordinary people teach the wise philosophers the true negative essence of life: a life so wretched, so miserable, so painful and so unfair, that the only way to face it is through some kind of ignorance, and not, as philosophers have always dreamed, through some wisdom that would allow one to reach a kind of "self-improvement". On the contrary, life is so hard and inconsiderate that, in order to live it, it is more convenient to be a worse human than we already are; more insensitive, more immoral, and more ignorant. In the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, paradoxically, we should preach this message: Ignore thyself! For who can guarantee that wisdom and life go hand in hand?"

"In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body's judgment is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead."

"Life is not worth its cost in pain. If we consider happiness as the goal of human existence, we will have to admit that we are definitely headed for failure. It would be much easier to defend the idea that suffering is the real goal, because we have many more sources of pain than pleasure. On a relative scale, our sensitivity to pain is several times greater than our sensitivity to pleasure. There are many more ways to be unhappy than to be happy. Our greatest pains are always more intense and lasting than our greatest joys. Finally, we do not need to cultivate our intellect, reflect on the world or make any effort in order to experience suffering: it is available at any time. To suffer, merely being alive is enough. Pain is like the essential element in which we are immersed, and happiness being only the moments when we manage to reach the surface and fill our lungs with air, only to be once again swallowed by the depths. This may sound unpleasant, but if we were to make a decisive bet with eternal happiness on the line, we would certainly place our trust in the ultimate victory of pain over pleasure. Faced with a bet of such importance, it is certain that we would quickly recover our lucidity and reconsider our silly opinions almost instantly about the dreams of personal happiness that we cultivate on a daily basis."

"Our situation is not so different from that of a donkey with a carrot hanging in front of it. Our carrot is called happiness. When pursuing it, we chase after something we will never obtain. We have the impression that we are born to be happy, but this is only because we are tied to the internal logic of our biological nature. The condition of being alive imposes pleasure and suffering as the supreme points of reference. However, pleasure is only a psychological mechanism designed to influence our behavior, not a reality to which we are heading. This will become clear if we consider the fact that, when we reach the satisfaction of some desire, we have only a few moments of pleasure as a reward and, afterwards, new needs begin to torment us and make us restless. It will not be long before we take action again, in a cycle of dissatisfaction that will only end with the death of the individual or with the acquisition of a grain of good sense."

"If, on the one hand, to desire is to suffer, on the other, not desiring is impossible. Therefore, be it due to the illusion of happiness or the tortures of boredom, we are forced to keep ourselves active, and with that we expose ourselves to suffering. In this process, reason can refute biology as much as it wants: it is biting the hand that feeds it and, sooner or later, will suffer reprisals for trying to put aside our instinctual needs. The brain is full of mechanisms that detect attempts to circumvent the rules of this game called life. In this game, we may believe that there is some chance of victory. As in a casino, everything is designed to lead us to believe that we really have some chance of success. Let us remember, however, the main premise: the house always wins. It was nature that made the rules, not us - and as our most primitive instincts prevent us from abandoning our gambling, the fate that awaits us is certain bankruptcy. The fact that we understand the mechanism that leads us to such an impasse does little to change it. As chronic addicts, understanding our addiction is tantamount to illuminating the gears of what controls us - just making our freedom an even more distant dream. We know why we are like this, but this understanding does not allow us to escape from our condition. In this situation, all we can do is play within the rules as intelligently as possible, in order to minimize the suffering of which we are constantly victims."

"If the universe were self-aware, the only reasonable conclusion one could reach about it is that it hates itself, as it has decided to manifest itself as a legion of survival machines that tear each other apart for a living."

"I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe."

"Nor is it clear to me, as people are born and die, where they are coming from and where they are going. Nor why, being so ephemeral in this world, they take such pains to make their houses pleasing to the eye. The master and the dwelling are competing in their transience. Both will perish from this world like the morning glory that blooms in the morning dew. In some cases, the dew may evaporate first, while the flower remains--but only to be withered by the morning sun. In others the flower may wither even before the dew is gone, but no one expects the dew to last until evening."

"Among the four great elements recognized by Buddhism, three--fire, water, and wind--are frequently associated with disasters, but earth is most often identified with stability. Still, in the Saiko era (540), I believe, there was an earthquake so severe that it damaged the neck of the Todaiji's Great Buddha so that the head fell off, and did unusual damage to many other things. But it was no match for the violence of the earthquake this time. Those who experienced this earthquake all talked about it that way at the time, that of all the miserable things in this world, it was the worst, seemed to be a thing of evil passions. But the days and months passed into years, and they came to deplore other things, so that you might go for a month now without meeting anyone talking about the earthquake. People respond to these disasters in terms of their own experience. Unless the disaster has struck them personally, their circumstances, their environment, it is dismissed as a superficial thing."

"Trophonius and Agamedes are said to have ... built a temple to Apollo at Delphi, offered supplications to the God, and desired of him some extraordinary reward for their care and labour, particularizing nothing, but asking for whatever was best for men. Accordingly, Apollo signified to them that he would bestow it on them in three days, and on the third day at daybreak they were found dead."

"Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?"

"I too have a hope: a hope for absolute forgetfulness. But is it hope or despair? Is it not the negation of all future hopes? I want not to know, not to know even that I do not know. Why so many problems, arguments, vexations? Why the consciousness of death? How much longer all this thinking and philosophizing?"

"Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?"

"The moments follow each other; nothing lends them the illusion of a content or the appearance of a meaning; they pass; their course is not ours; we contemplate that passage, prisoners of a stupid perception."

"Creator of values, man is the delirious creature par excellence, victim of the belief that something exists, whereas he need merely hold his breath: everything stops; suspend his emotions: nothing stirs; suppress his whims: the world turns to ashes. Reality is a creation of our excesses, of our disproportions and derangements. Rein in your palpitations and the course of events slows down; without our ardors, space is ice. Time itself passes only because our desires beget that decorative universe which a jot of lucidity would lay bare. One touch of clearsightedness reduces us to our primal state: nakedness; a suspicion of irony strips us of that trumpery hope which let us dupe ourselves and devise illusion: every contrary path leads outside of life. Ennui is merely the beginning of such an itinerary... It makes us find time long, too long—unsuited to show us an end. Detached from every object, having nothing external to assimilate, we destroy ourselves in slow motion, since the future has stopped offering us a raison d'être. Ennui shows us an eternity which is not the transcendence of time, but its wreck; it is the infinity of souls that have rotted for lack of superstitions, a banal absolute where nothing any longer keeps things from turning in circles, in search of their own Fall. Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui."

"The man suffering from a characterized sickness is not entitled to complain: he has an occupation. The great sufferers are never bored: disease fills them, the way remorse feeds the great criminals. For any intense suffering produces a simulacrum of plenitude and proposes a terrible reality to consciousness, which it cannot elude; while suffering without substance in that temporal mourning of ennui affords consciousness nothing that forces it to fruitful action. How to cure an unlocalized and supremely impalpable disease which infects the body without leaving any trace upon it, which insinuates itself into the soul without marking it by any sign? Ennui is like a sickness we have survived, but one which has absorbed our possibilities, our reserves of attention and has left us impotent to fill the void which follows upon the disappearance of our pangs and the fading of our torments. Hell is a haven next to this displacement in time, this empty and prostrate languor in which nothing stops us but the spectacle of the universe decaying before our eyes. What therapeutics to invoke against a disease we no longer remember and whose aftermath encroaches upon our days? How invent a remedy for existence, how conclude this endless cure? And how recover from your own birth? Ennui, that incurable convalescence..."

"If only I had a stone’s vocation! A heart: origin of every torment. . . I aspire to the object, to the blessing of matter and opacity. The zigzagging of a gnat seems to me an apocalyptic enterprise. It is a sin to get outside yourself. . . The wind—air’s insanity! Music, the madness of silence! By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let “desire” be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping."

"To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: “Nothing on earth has any worth,” to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally... For there is no progression in the notion of universal vanity, nor conclusion; and as far as we venture in such ruminations, our knowledge makes no gain: it is in its present state as rich and as void as at its point of departure. It is a surcease within the incurable, a leprosy of the mind, a revelation by stupor. A simple-minded person, an idiot who has experienced an illumination and grown used to it with no means of leaving it behind, of recovering his vague and comfortable condition-—such is the state of the man who finds himself committed in spite of himself to the perception of universal futility. Abandoned by his nights, virtually a victim of a lucidity which smothers him, what is he to do with this day which never manages to end? When will the light stop shedding its beams, deadly to the memory of a night world anterior to all that was? How far away chaos is, restful and calm, the chaos dating from before the terrible Creation, or sweeter still, the chaos of mental nothingness!"

"All truths are against us. But we go on living, because we accept them in themselves, because we refuse to draw the consequences. Where is the man who has translated—in his behavior—a single conclusion of the lessons of astronomy, of biology, and who has decided never to leave his bed again out of rebellion or humility in the face of the sidereal distances or the natural phenomena? Has pride ever been conquered by the evidence of our unreality? And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity? The sciences prove our nothingness. But who has grasped their ultimate teaching? Who has become a hero of total sloth? No one folds his arms: we are busier than the ants and the bees. Yet if an ant, if a bee—by the miracle of an idea or by some temptation of singularity— were to isolate herself in the anthill or the hive, if she contemplated from outside the spectacle of her labors, would she still persist in her pains?"

"By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air. All History is in a state of putrefaction; its odors shift toward the future: we rush toward it, if only for the fever inherent in any decomposition."

"Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and which has not ended badly."

"Forever be accursed the star under which I was born, may no sky protect it, let it crumble in space like a dust without honor! And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the lists of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed its days, and yet I am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them the more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe— where nonetheless everything repeats itself—will it never come to an end? How long must I keep telling myself: “I loathe this life I idolize?” The nullity of our deliriums makes us all so many gods subject to an insipid fatality. Why rebel any longer against the symmetry of this world when Chaos itself can only be a system of disorders? Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is foreseen, frightful, and vain."

"No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if ever there was one. Yet it is with the hope of being cured of it some day that we accept life and endure its ordeals. The years pass, the wound remains."

"I accumulate the past, constantly making out of it and casting into it the present, without giving it a chance to exhaust its own duration. To live is to suffer the sorcery of the possible; but when I see in the possible itself the past that is to come, then everything turns into potential bygones, and there is no longer any present, any future. What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming."

"To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy."

"I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive."

"The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools."

"Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy."

"Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being."

"If everyone had seen through everything, if everyone had "understood," history would have ceased long since. But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to "understand." And even if everyone understood except for one, history would be perpetuated because of that one, because of his blindness. Because of a single illusion!"

"We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster."

"I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world."

"Then what is Life?—When stripp'd of its disguise, A thing to be desir'd it cannot be; Since every thing that meets our foolish eyes Gives proof sufficient of its vanity."

"We laugh, but inept is our laughter, We should weep, and weep sore, Who are shattered like glass and thereafter Remolded no more."