I asked google AI if there are any great philosophers who fully embrace optimism and it insisted yes. But it listed names who are absolutely NOT optimistic. The dumbass thing tried to tell me Nietszche was an optimist. I’m sure it’s just programmed to act all chipper on the subject of suicide due to all the lawsuits when it tells the truth.
At any rate, I’m looking to read any philosophical book (fiction preferred) that you think encapsulates existence. Bonus points if it isn’t bleak as hell. But if any philosophical work speaks to you, or helps you in any way, suggest it here.
My 2 go-tos have been Camus and Krasznahorkai (who recently won the Pulitzer for literature, rightly). But I feel like I’ve outgrown Camus. Not through any fault of his. I just don’t think he ever understood extreme pain, so his thoughts apply more to people who are privileged (literally privileged like the protagonists in his books: doctors, judges, moneyed people and free spirits).
Krasznahorkai I think understands both the emptiness of existence and the potential for immeasurable pain, brutality, torture in said empty existence. He’s not as rosy as Camus. His protagonists are often impoverished, crippled, and physically oppressed. But while he effectively uses absurdity and humor to soften the blow, and while he acknowledges the value in islands of beauty, the bottom line is still dark and pretty hopeless.
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Well Nietzsche /was/ optimist. He believed that man still can create superman. But fully embraced optimism? No, definitely not.
My suggestion: Schopenhauer and Vedant. Schopenhauer was bleak but not bleak as hell. Vedant was solace of Schopenhauer.
All philosophers, short of full nihilists, embrace some islands of value in an otherwise empty existence. Nietzsche is no more an optimist than Camus; both saw the value in pursuing a purpose as a way of giving life a sort of meaning, but both also acknowledged that the big picture, existence itself, is doomed.
Like I said, Krasznahorkai helps me through some days with his absurdist (yet lucid) view. But should it be so hard to find one outright optimist? One great mind in all the billions of great minds in recorded history, who could intelligently argue without hiding behind gods and speculation, that the big picture is a good one?
Answer: yes, hard. Impossible. The closest might be Epicurus who argued that life, absent of pain, is worth living for the sheer experience. But Buddha rightly shot him to hell: “Life is pain.” Epicurus must’ve been smoking some good shit.
I’ve been curious about Schopenhauer though. What do you recommend to read?
A philosopher is someone who aims for truth. We have to see not whether they had good or bad things to say about life but whether they reached to pessimistic or optimistic conclusions about truth. If the truth, the big picture, is optimistic, everything else collapses before it. Nietzsche was optimistic about it. He believed in intrinsic power of life and was willing to play its game, though he had doubts whether humans can endure that and keep up with that. Buddha was optimistic in that it’s possible to get out of game of life. Even Schopenhauer, pessimist as he was, was not hopeless. I admire him for his honesty in enquiry. His main work is World as will and representation. But it doesn’t contain fiction or stories. Vedant contains stories. What I like about vedant is that it doesn’t do versus. It doesn’t say this is bad bad life and this is the escape. Instead what is perceived as escape or freedom is the fundamental nature of our existence and is present all the time. No purpose, no effort.
I think Schopenhauer and Vedant are excellent together. Schopenhauer provides all the proof of falsity of perception and vedant shows the truth beyond perception.
Saying philosophy is the search for truth can be applied to anything. A priest, a fanatic, a lunatic look for truth. What interests us is what they find.
What they find can broadly fall into the category of optimism or pessimism. A lack of either, i.e. an infinite status quo or oscillation, can be classed as irresolubility or absurdity, as Krasznahorkai investigates beautifully and implies is pessimism.
Nietzche, like many others, focused on an immediate goal, the übermensch, but this was not a reflection of optimism or pessimism so much as an ontological discourse on our immediate purpose or trajectory. The Nazis seized on this as their “optimism” but as we saw, it was grossly myopic. As I told AI, and as it quickly capitulated, Nietzsche (and all other examples it blindly spouted) focused on infinitesimal “optimism” but acknowledged that the big picture is unknown at best, or at worst, dark as fuck.
As this is a suicide site and we are all facing mortality if not, in the absence of an immortal soul, the end of existence, obviously I’m not interested in myopic interpretations but the big picture. At that, even dumbass Google AI agreed that it found no evidence of a widely published or historically recorded philosopher who, without falling back to the deus ex machina, fully embraced optimism.
Many philosophers have called the big picture unknown and unknowable. But some have not, like Buddha and Vedant authors. They call it indescribable but not unknowable. Infact Vedantis have very positive view of it. Maybe AI doesn’t term them as “philosophers” so it doesn’t mention them. But in my view they were, they were philosophers who completed their search.
What do you mean by ‘falling back to deus ex machina’? You mean resorting to God?
Have you read Krasznahorkai? He offers a brilliant explanation, extension and post-Nazi upgrade of Nietzsche.