Philosophy

"I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower."

"Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding."

"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness."

"All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, relations of ideas, and matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic ... [which are] discoverable by the mere operation of thought ... Matters of fact, which are the second object of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing."

"If the positivist model of scientific knowledge is false, does it mean that the only cure is a thoroughgoing relativism? For the record, positivism is not the only game in town in the natural or social sciences. It is not the only conception of science. Marx's critique of bourgeois philosophy, political economy, and utopian socialism is the first stage leading to the affirmation of a dialectical materialist conception of science. Marx's rejection of empiricism, as the epistemological basis for science, is fundamentally a discarding of the empiricist premise—that science is exclusively descriptive and devoid of prescriptive tasks. The concepts of exploitation, class struggle, and the theory of reification, for example, possess both a descriptive and normative (critical) aspect for Marx. After all, Marx made it very plain: Capital is A Critique of Political Economy. Hence, Hume's fork has no place at a Marxist dinner table."

"Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists."

"Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit to the least- advantaged members of society."

"If people are badly off, suffering, or otherwise remediably miserable, it is not appropriate to address their ill-being by bringing more happy people into the world to counterbalance their disadvantage. We should instead improve the situation of those who are badly off."

"All that matters is the pleasure-pain axis. Pain and pleasure disclose the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Our overriding ethical obligation is to minimise suffering."

"[F]rom the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure, and especially not one man's pain by another man's pleasure. Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all [...]."

"[M]oral value is based upon the individual’s experience of pain (defined broadly to cover all types of suffering whether cognitive, emotional, or sensory), […] and […] the main moral objective is to reduce the pain of others."

"We all, thank goodness, feel a natural spark of sympathy for the sufferings of others. We need to catch that spark and fan it into a fire of rational and universal compassion."

"The point of the term “suffering-focused ethics” is ... not to be a novel or impressive contribution to ethical theorizing, but instead to serve as a pragmatic concept that can unite as effective a coalition as possible toward the shared aim of making a real-world difference — to reduce suffering for sentient beings."

"[T]he phrases 'negative well-being' and 'negative experiences' are unfortunate because if something is negative, it sounds as if there is a positive counterpart. Better names may be 'problematic moments in life' and 'problematic experiences', because unproblematic, which seems to be the opposite of problematic, does not imply positive."

"For ethics, there is only suffering and the effective ways of alleviating it."

"The Arhats and Bhagavats of the past, present, and future, all say thus, speak thus, declare thus, explain thus: All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure, unchangeable, eternal law, which the clever ones, who understand the world, have declared: among the zealous and the not zealous, among the faithful and the not faithful, among the not cruel and the cruel, among those who have worldly weakness and those who have not, among those who like social bonds and those who do not: "that is the truth, that is so, that is proclaimed in this (creed)"."

"One suffering may be so wholly incommensurable with another that no true impression is given by calling it a hundred or a thousand times greater; in other words, the lesser, endured in a thousand frames, could not for an instant be set against the greater endured in a single frame. Nor is the essential distinction between endurable and unendurable pain at all impugned, as some seem to think, by the impossibility of drawing a distinct line between them — an argument which would equally forbid us to call yellow and red essentially distinct colours."

"The second prima facie right that all sentient creatures possess is the right not to be made to suffer. Sentient creatures, by their nature, are able to take enjoyment from their lives and to endure suffering: in part, this is what gives them equal intrinsic moral worth. ... in general terms all sentient creatures experience suffering as something that is bad for them and inimical to their welfare. And that explains why the vast majority of us already accept that the interest of sentient creatures in not being made to suffer grounds duties in others."

"... if welfare comparisons or integrations are to be applied across multiple individuals, it can only be done separately for pain and separately for pleasure. Moreover, if it weren’t for the empirical fact that being deprived of pleasure can itself feel painful, just as being deprived of food does, it is not clear whether happiness ... would be a welfare matter at all – or at least whether it would be a moral matter (rather than merely a hedonic one)."

"[T]he duty to relieve suffering comes in two parts: a prohibition against inflicting suffering, and a requirement to prevent it. What we tend to underestimate is less the former than the latter."

"[T]he claim that suffering is bad for those who experience it and thus ought in general to be prevented when possible cannot be seriously doubted."

"[H]uman rights norms are primarily focused on preventing the worst forms of human suffering, even if they only concern a small portion of the population. This task has moral priority over the promotion of the maximum well-being of the majority of people. [...] the entire human rights enterprise can be regarded as a social response to suffering [...]."

"[I]f suffering warrants special moral concern, the truth is that we should never forget about its existence. For even if we had abolished suffering throughout the living world, there would still be a risk that it might reemerge, and this risk would always be worth reducing."

"Whatever else our ethical commitments and specific constraints are, we can and should certainly all agree that, in principle, the overall amount of conscious suffering in all beings capable of conscious suffering should be minimized."

"Classical utilitarians assume [...] that pains and pleasures are commensurable so that they can balance one another out in a grand utilitarian aggregate. But it is far from obvious that pains and pleasures are commensurable in this way, and there is good reason to doubt that the twin utilitarian aims are even compatible-- at least not without further explanation."

"[T]he value of relieving suffering is […] prior to the value of providing additional happiness to the well-off."

"Ma négritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdité ruée contre la clameur du jour ma négritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’oeil mort de la terre ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience."

"My negritude is not a stone nor deafness flung out against the clamor of the day my negritude is not a white speck of dead water on the dead eye of the earth my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral it plunges into the red flesh of the soil it plunges into the blazing flesh of the sky my negritude riddles with holes the dense affliction of its worthy patience."

"Life is subordinated to the laws of thermodynamics and destined to decay. Suffering is unavoidable because of accidents, defeats, illnesses and aging. Happiness is avoidable; it can be terminated at any point in time. There are genetic defects which cause immense suffering (e.g. Sickle-cell disease). No corresponding phenomenon is known which causes immense happiness. There are more cases of chronic pain than cases of long-lasting pleasure. Due to evolutionary pressure, creatures are capable of experiencing more intense pain than pleasure. The pleasure of orgasm is less than the pain of deadly injury, since death is a much larger loss of reproductive success than a single sex act is a gain [Shulman]. ... It is easy to make someone unhappy but much less easy to make that person happy again. It is easier to produce suffering than to produce happiness."

"Life knows us not and we do not know life,—we don't know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore: thoughts vanish: words, once pronounced, die: and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow,—only the string of my platitude seems to have no end. As our peasants say: "Pray brother, forgive me for the love of God." And we don't know what forgiveness is, nor what love, nor where God is."

"To explore what possible absolutes might be available from such a speculatively justified survey of the scientific account of reality, we examined in chapter 4 the consensus of the contemporary mathematical sciences concerning the ordering principles and nature of reality as it is understood for today. There we discovered that nearly every contemporary scientist agrees that there is at least one absolutely grounding principle which conditions, organizes, regulates, and determines the nature of existence at every level: the law of entropic decay as articulated in the second law of thermodynamics. On the basis of this law, contemporary scientists agree, the universe can be understood from beginning to end as entirely unbecoming: as perpetually dissipating, dissolving, and decaying in pursuit of the absolute and eventual purity of thermal equilibrium. Indeed, as we saw there, material existence is nothing more than this steady dissipation of existence, whether in the form of matter, motion, or heat, toward the ultimate end of its complete annihilation. As a result, we concluded, it is possible to say with complete assurance that everything which exists must not only eventually disintegrate and disappear, leaving only a faint trace of background radiation more or less evenly distributed throughout an eternally expanding and utterly empty universe; but, moreover, that everything which exists is always already working toward this end — through its own development and its consumption of free energy from the surrounding environment for the maintenance and perpetuation of its own existence. From this fact, we know with certainty that the universe as a whole, as well as every existing thing which composes it, is radically and irrevocably finite; as well as the concomitant fact that everything which exists functions to hasten this end as expediently as possible — that existence, in other words, is an agent of oblivion. Indeed, as we saw, every being exists, no matter how complex, solely to accomplish this annihilative end more effectively and efficiently. Thus, we concluded that the entropic nature of matter not only defines the totality of material existence itself, but serves moreover as its formal organizing principle, its efficient driving force, and its final teleological end; and, in the sense, might be seen as the Aristotelian essence of existence. For this reason, we further concluded that not only might every existent object be defined as an agent of oblivion, but that being itself might be understood as little more than an annihilative machine. And so, we discovered that a new metaphysics might be established from the absolute facts of reality as described by the contemporary sciences — a metaphysics of decay. If the classical pursuit of an absolutely justifiable account of absolute truth, universal moral value, and ultimate meaning is to be established anew, we concluded, it must be founded upon and defined within this metaphysics of decay — this metaphysics which recognizes that to be is to unbecome."

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

"If we can deduce any moral value from these facts, it is certainly not the classical claim that reality exists as a moral good, nor is it the much more palatable modern claim that existence is fundamentally value-neutral. Given the entropic antagonism inherent to reality as it is accounted for in the contemporary mathematical sciences, coupled with the fact the universe is not only indifferent to what it creates, but that it actively strives to destroy what it creates and necessitates, in the process, the suffering of all sentient beings within it, we can only conclude that if reality has any absolutely inherent moral value, it is less than zero. Indeed, if any absolute moral value can be speculatively extracted and rationally deduced from the absolute nature of reality as it is accounted for by contemporary science, it is this: that existence is a terrifying and monstrous evil. From this it becomes clear that it is decidedly not good to be; in fact, it is better not to be at all, and best of all would be if nothing had ever come into being in the first place and we had never been born. From what we’ve seen concerning the nature of reality as an inescapable entropic power, existence appears to be a horrible curse and a miserable burden for all those condemned to consciousness by it. If any ethical claims can be extracted from this absolute truth, they must be grounded upon and deducible from this fact."

"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."

"This metaphysics, as we saw, necessarily lends itself to a pessimistic evaluation of being. Nevertheless, I argued, there is some unquestionably good news hidden behind the prima-facie nihilism of this pessimism. For what this pessimistic metaphysics provides is precisely the opposite: namely, a new and firm foundation for the reinauguration of philosophy’s normative projects in a universal and practically meaningful way. In this way, far from contributing to nihilism, this pessimistic metaphysics effectively halts the slide of post-Kantian philosophy into either some form of nihilism, quietism, or fanatical neo-dogmatism; for it proves definitively that existence has a specific purpose and aim! Unfortunately, this good news does not come without its own accompanying bad news. Indeed, what the evangel of the absolute fact of entropy entails for philosophy is that reality faces an even more horrible fate than if it had no purpose at all. For, as it turns out, the purpose and aim of existence is solely to desolate, destroy, and ultimately obliterate itself; and, in doing so, to necessarily cause harm and provoke the suffering of every sentient being. Everything eats and is eaten — everything destroys and will be destroyed. If any meaning for existence can be deduced from the second law of thermodynamics then it is this: that we, and indeed everything else, exist solely to consume, exterminate, and eventually annihilate reality. From this perspective, it becomes clear that humans are little more than cogs in a cataclysmic machine, and our existence is just one of the many pistons organized by the entropic principle of material reality to achieve its ultimate aim: to cease to be — to achieve absolute nothingness. From this we can conclude, as we have seen, not only the irrefutable fact that existence is fundamentally and irrevocably finite, structured as it is solely to end itself; but that existence is fundamentally antagonistic to itself, requiring as it does that each being maintain itself through the destruction of other existent beings. What this means concretely is not only that all things exist merely to decay, dissolve, and disappear but also to dismantle, damage, and destroy every other being, and indeed being itself, in the process. Moreover, it means that every conscious being which exists is necessarily bound by the structure and nature of existence itself to suffer and to contribute to the suffering and misery of everyone else capable of experiencing and anticipating their own decay, dissolution, and annihilation. This, as we’ve seen, is the consequence of the absolute fact that existence is an expression of an entropic drive to destroy."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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?"