The subjectivity of pessimism
u/AndrewSMcIntosh
Something I often think about is how subjective our human valuations of existence are. Not just pessimists, but everyone. Whenever anyone is placing value on existence, it has to be subjective because it can only come from individual perspective (not without universal values of course, that’s impossible, but the valuation itself is individual), so it can only take in whatever biases an individual has.
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It’s not that compelling and even convincing cases can’t be made for pessimism. It’s just that, by it’s nature, valuing existence has to be subjective and therefore never entirely “True”. Which would be a pointless exercise anyway – why have a “Truth” about existence when it doesn’t merit much more than “it exists”?
Was wondering, though – how do others feel about that? […]
But of course, the philosophers, at least, were absolutely convinced they had worked the “meaning” of everything out. But you’d expect that – it’s part of their job to give accounts that they actually believe (for the most part). So I’d suppose that there are plenty of pessimists who also think they’ve got the whole thing worked out and it’s everyone else in the world who’s just too dumb to see.
I suppose I worry about it because I’m very averse to people proclaiming absolutes about what existence “is” or “isn’t”. I realise how important such absolutism is to people and don’t claim to be above it entirely myself, despite my own mental efforts not to fall for my own beliefs. Do others feel the same? Or are others content with the assurance that they’re “right”? This could all well be trivial – I’m sure there are many who would say so – but it’s still something that interests me.
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Comments
u/Vormav
A variety of thoughts come to mind, all difficult to pin down in a hastily written post. Compressing years of reading and wondering into a few generally understandable lines is damn near impossible sometimes, so I’ll throw some ideas out without tying them up.
My immediate issue is that, for all its utility, the subjective/objective distinction that everyone throws around as a response to any position that includes a logopathic (in Cabrera’s sense: cognitive-affective concepts) component obfuscates more than it clarifies. Invariably there’s truth to it, and invariably it’s not enough. Where did that subject’s impression come from? “It’s subjective tho” is an easy way to reel in someone spouting rhetoric that’s transparently an intellectualised reflection of their problems but risks neutralising every form of thought that focuses on the structural features of the reality that creates said individuals by smugly pointing out that the thinkers, after all, are just people like anyone else. It sneaks in the suggestion that, since we all receive limited, localised impressions of this world, our reflections on it must necessarily all be equal–equally groundless and inscrutable.
I do think you’re right about valuation. We are making valuations about worth, if only implicitly. But I don’t see that as (necessarily) a problem. I once read an odd criticism of Marx: granting the total truth of his analysis in Capital, why should that mean anything needs to be done about it? Well, there were and are plenty of people quite content to look over such unfathomable suffering with glazed eyes. Others actively champion it. To say that reacting to the horrors of capital with a desire to utterly destroy it is subjective may be true, but it also sidesteps Marx’s specific claim that such a desire is an interest specific to one class and anathema to another inherently generated from the material, social reality of their circumstances. The search for pure, noumenal Truth isn’t the only justifiable grounds for valuation.
The untruth is located in the substratum of genuineness itself, the individual. If it is in the principium individuationis, as the antipodes Hegel and Schopenhauer both recognized, that the secret of the world’s course is concealed, then the conception of an ultimate and absolute substantiality of the self falls victim to an illusion that protects the established order even while its essence decays. […] What presents itself as an original entity, a monad, is only the result of a social division of the social process. Precisely as an absolute, the individual is a mere reflection of property relations. In him the fictitious claim is made that what is biologically one must logically precede the social whole, from which it is only isolated by force, and its contingency is held up as a standard of truth.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, “Gold Assay” (99)
This is what I can never avoid when this comes up. The individual self subjectively experiencing these things is not a neutral entity free from scrutiny. Adorno takes it further than anyone, really, so he’s a useful author to quote. That source is highly recommended. The subject (derived from Latin that means “thrown under”, interestingly) is hurled into a space with specific, invariant features. Reactions to them vary; they don’t. Whether we can go as far as Absolute Truth, whatever that might mean, may not even be relevant if more readily available information is sufficient for a particular context.
I think the key distinction between the kind of people you’re likely thinking of (the reason rants are banned here – ed. in this sub) and the best thinkers in the area is that the latter avoid those traps. They focus either on readily demonstrable structural features of human life with a metaphilosophical stance aware of the absurdity of claims to Absolute Truth (Cabrera); [or,] build philosophical concepts eerily akin to physics and thus reinforceable that way (Mainländer); focus on the implications of their own lived experience with detours into science, literature, and history (Cioran, Ligotti, Bernhard); and otherwise make claims that persist through any kind of subjective, individual valuation with only light, measured suggestions on what can or should be done about these problems.
Applying “that’s subjective tho” to that rings very, very hollow. To criticise them, you have to take the claims apart; ultimately you can always say, of course, that even if human existence is structurally terminal, situated between poles of boredom and pain, whatever, there’s no inherent reason to then disparage that existence and advocate for its cessation. Those who feel differently will react like Marx did to the bourgeois theorists who saw no problem with the state of 19th century Europe. I don’t think they should be ashamed of that.