Pessimism and Optimism – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

Pessimism and Anti-Natalism in True Detective

True Detective is a new HBO series getting rave reviews. This bit, I am told by Karl White from whom I first learned about the series, is from the first episode. It's good. I'll leave it to you to sort through the sophistry of Rust's spiel.

Here is some TD dialog about religion. I'll say this about it: it is well done and stimulates thought.

The scriptwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, is a very interesting cat who abandoned a tenure-track university gig to try his hand at writing for TV. It takes balls to give up security for a long shot. Especially when you have a kid. At that point nothing-ventured-nothing-gained risk-taking begins to taper off into irresponsibility. If I had had young children I wouldn't have quit my tenured post. Conservatives are cautious and responsible, fiscally and otherwise.

Pizzolatto earns a place in my Mavericks category. Bio and interview here. Excerpt:

Do you think part of the reason why television had so much appeal for you was that you knew you’d be able to reach an audience? Everyone has a TV in the living room. Not everyone reads literary novels.

That’s a great point. I think, with myself, growing up in rural Louisiana but having TV—TV jumps all these class boundaries. For a kid to even have a disposition to be willing to sit down and read literary fiction and not regard it as a waste of time—that requires a certain amount of cultural influence and education. But TV sneaks in, no matter what. I really like that. And the idea that you could put your heart and soul and every bit of yourself into it, the same way you could a novel, and stay there and make sure it was done right? That was all appealing.

That reminds me of my old entry, Books and Reality and Books, which begins:

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

Whither America?

The Case for Pessimism (Mark Steyn). The Case for Optimism (John Podhoretz).

Silenian and Epicurean Sources of “Death is Not an Evil”

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the specifically Epicurean reason for thinking death not an evil from another reason which is actually anti-Epicurean. I'll start with the second reason.

A. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence. This is the wisdom of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon."

B. Death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not. My being dead is not an evil state of affairs because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead. Since there is no such STOA, there is no bearer of the property of being evil. If this property has a bearer it cannot be an individual or a property but must be a STOA.

And so the Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil because axiologically neutral. The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The first reason is axiological, the second ontological. The Silenian pessimist renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole: it's no good, better never to have been born, with second best being to die young. By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died.

This reinforces my earlier conclusion that there is nothing nihilistic about the Epicurean position.

Kerouac October Quotation #13: Buddhist Life Denial

From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:

No hangup on nature is going to solve anything — nature is bestial — desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing — I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. — Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death. Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this. I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death. Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.

Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering. Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers. For life is pitiful.

Stop.