Notes to: Cosmic Pessimism

Material covered: Cosmic Pessimism, by Eugene Thacker

• "I like to imagine the idea of pessimist self-help." 
• "In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes--the crime of not pretending it's for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy--the 'as if.' Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied."
• "The very term 'pessimism' suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one--maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope." 
• "For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself." 
• "Pessimism involves a statement about a condition. In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst." 
• "Crying, laughing, sleeping--what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?" 
• "For the pessimist, failure is a question of 'when,' not 'if'--failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person's life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a stellar oblivion." 
• "Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end--though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity." 
• "But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that's just because disorder is the order we don't yet see; it's just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn't exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. [ellipsis original]"
• "For the pessimist, 'the worst' is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it is eclipses entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer 'the worst.' [ellipsis original]"
• "It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...)."
• "Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end." 
• "Doom is marked by temporality--all things precariously drawn to their end--whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees." 
• "We do not live, we are lived. What would a philosophy have to be to begin from this, rather than to arrive at it?"
• "For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes--the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could have done is to play the bass." 
• "In tragedy, the flute (aulos) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. Scholars of Greek tragedy refer to this as the 'mourning voice.' Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music." 
• "There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on finitude and temporality, existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection." 
• "Given Schopenhauer's view on life--that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death--given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text--was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song?" 
• "If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he has identified the great life of Western culture--the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: 'If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.' In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn't it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange, though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person's life, so that mourning and living would be the same thing." 
• "Human beings deep in thought look like corpses." 
• "Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism--Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer's in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter." 
• Schopenhauer: "I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body; but the idea of philosophy-professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder."
• "Around you this night a thousand million firefly anatomies breathe in and out in their slow-burning liturgical glow." 
• "The Abyss of a Book. Schopenhauer, using the metaphors of astronomy, once noted that there were three types of writers: meteors (the flare of fads and trends), plants (the faithful rotation of tradition), and the fixed stars (impervious and unwavering). But in Schopenhauer's own writing--aphorisms, fragments, stray thoughts--one is acutely aware of the way that all writing ultimately negates itself, either to be forgotten or to have been so precise that it results in silence. Was Schopenhauer aware that he himself was a fourth type of writer--the black hole?"
• "Nietzsche himself was a fastidious user of his notebooks, often writing on the right-hand side only and then flipping the notebook over, allowing him to fill notebooks front-to-back and back-tofront." 
• "Schopenhauer, no less fastidious than Nietzsche, preferred to keep several notebooks going at once, notebooks of all sizes and types--octavo, quarto, folio, bound and unbound. Some notebooks remained fixed on his desk at home, while others could be taken with him on walks, and still other notebooks were reserved for traveling." 
• "Later, Nietzsche regarded pessimism as something to be overcome, a saying 'yes' to this world, as it is, unfortunate, indifferent, tragic. Nietzsche often names this horizon a 'Dionysian pessimism.' But the stakes are high, perhaps too high--even for Nietzsche. There is a sense in which the entirety of Nietzsche's philosophy is a sustained, concerted attempt to shake pessimism."
• "What I've always wanted to know is who sold back those volumes of Schopenhauer to that used bookstore? One usually sells a book back out of disappointment. Occasionally, one sells a book back out of enthusiasm." 
• "Pessimism is the last refuge of hope." 
• "Admittedly, Pascal is partially to blame for the confusion. He wrote his many fragments on large sheets of paper, separating each by a horizontal line. When a sheet was full, he would then cut the paper along the horizontal lines, so that each fragment was self-contained on a strip of paper. These strips of paper where [sic] then grouped into piles. Pascal then poked a hole in the top corner of each of the strips, and joined them by running a thread through the hole, forming a bundle. Many of the bundles were thematically grouped--for instance, fragments on human vanity, or boredom, or religious despair were each sewn together. But other bundles don't appear to have any thematic grouping, and many of the fragments are not sewn together at all. What the reader confronts is a book that is, in every way, unbound. What strikes me is the care Pascal put into his bundles, threading them together like fabric, or a wound. On the evening of the 23rd of November 1654, Pascal had what scholars refer to as his 'second conversion.' It is recorded in a short text known as 'The Memorial.' Composed of terse, mystical visions of fire and light, it was written by Pascal on a tiny piece of paper. The paper was sewn into the inside of Pascal's coat, so that it was always near his heart, and it was discovered on him when he died." 
• "Schopenhauer, the depressive Kantian." 
• "The notion of an American pessimism is an oxymoron, which is as good a reason as any to undertake it." 
• "Philosophers are often book lovers, though not all book lovers are like. The distance that separates the bibliophile from the bibliomaniac is the same distance that separates the optimist from the pessimist." 
• "Schopenhauer's words are uniquely expressed in a place like Angkor Wat, the temple city whose main entrance houses two massive libraries, now empty. Standing in them today, one feels one is inside a tomb." 
• "One always admits to being a pessimist." 
• "Pessimism's propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke."
• "Nietzsche once commented that he could never completely follow Schopenhauer's pessimism because, in saying 'no' to the world it must eventually negate itself--it is a form of thought that constantly undermines itself. In fact, Schopenhauer was so successful at being this type of pessimist that a reviewer of one of his books assumed that Schopenhauer was already dead (he was not--but found the review disappointing nevertheless)." 
• "'Are you a pessimist?' 'On my better days...'"
• "The Ether of a Book. Occasionally, one discovers there are books that are written not to be read. They are penned by obscure and neglected authors, most of whom have gone mad or mysteriously disappeared. The books themselves are difficult to find; if one is lucky there is a dusty old copy in the Miskatonic University library (though you will most likely find it has mysteriously gone missing). One almost never mentions them casually (e.g., 'What are you reading?' 'Oh nothing, just the Necronomicon'). When they are mentioned, they are mentioned with ominous ceremony." 
• "The idea that a person might be driven mad by a book is fantastical, even absurd--especially today, as physical books themselves seem to be vanishing into an ether of oblique and agglomerating metadata. We are so used to consuming books for the information they contain that we rarely consider the possibility that the books might in turn consume us." 
• "Holbrook Jackson's Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) goes further, tracing that fine line where the love of books (bibliophilia) turns into book madness (bibliomania). And the madness of possessing books turns with great subtlety into the madness of being possessed by books. Jackson even recounts what is no doubt the pinnacle of bibliomania--the 'bibliophages,' who are so consumed by their books that they eat them, devoutly incorporating them into their anatomies, effacing all distinction between the literal and the figurative. Beyond this there is the 'bibliosomniac,' or the book-sleeper. Briefly mentioned in the Commentario Philobiblon, a[n] anonymous commentary on Richard de Bury's mid-14th century treatise, the book-sleeper is defined as 'a special type of monk, one who is asleep like a book [codex]."
• "Every person has a point beyond which life is no longer worth living. In this way we are all covert pessimists." 
• "On Bibliomania. It is striking how many of the works of pessimism are incomplete--Pascal's Pensees, Leopardi's Zibaldone, Lichtenberg's Sudelbucher, Joubert's Carnets, the stray fragents of Csath, Kafka, Klima, Pessoa.... These are not just works that the author was unable to complete, cut short by illness, depression, or distraction. These are works designed for incompletion--their very existence renders them dubious... Still, even an incomplete work can be finished. [original ellipsis, with four periods, original]"
• "'I leaf through books, I do not study them' (Montaigne)."
• "Lev Shestov, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: "When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless, he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible." 
• "Do philosophers also die philosophically?" 
• "On the evening of September 10th of 1793, Chamfort was about to be imprisoned for his criticisms of the French government. Rather than be taken prisoner, he resolved to kill himself. According to a friend, Chamfort calmly finished his dinner, excused himself, and went into his bedroom, where he loaded a pistol and fired it at his forehead. But he missed, injuring his nose and blowing out his right eye. Grabbing a razor, he then tried to slit his own throat--several times. Still alive, he then stabbed himself repeatedly in the heart, but to no avail. His final effort was to cut both wrists, but this again failed to produce the desired effect. Overcome with either pain or frustration, he cried out and collapsed into a chair. Barely alive, he reportedly said, 'What can you expect? One never manages to do anything successfully, even killing oneself.' The pessimist, who fails to die... [ellipsis original]"
• "One never writes a book of fragments. What one ends up with is less than a book. Or more than a book."