Download or read book Pessimism written by Joshua Foa Dienstag and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pessimism claims an impressive following--from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet "pessimist" remains a term of abuse--an accusation of a bad attitude--or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species--who would actually counsel pessimism? Joshua Foa Dienstag does. In Pessimism, he challenges the received wisdom about pessimism, arguing that there is an unrecognized yet coherent and vibrant pessimistic philosophical tradition. More than that, he argues that pessimistic thought may provide a critically needed alternative to the increasingly untenable progressivist ideas that have dominated thinking about politics throughout the modern period. Laying out powerful grounds for pessimism's claim that progress is not an enduring feature of human history, Dienstag argues that political theory must begin from this predicament. He persuasively shows that pessimism has been--and can again be--an energizing and even liberating philosophy, an ethic of radical possibility and not just a criticism of faith. The goal--of both the pessimistic spirit and of this fascinating account of pessimism--is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for life in a disordered and disenchanted universe.
Download or read book Weltschmerz written by Frederick C. Beiser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick C. Beiser presents a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy from the 1860s to c. 1900: the theory that life is not worth living. He explores its major defenders and chief critics, and examines how the theory redirected German philosophy away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life.
Download or read book The Uses of Pessimism written by Roger Scruton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging widely over human history and culture, from ancient Greece to the current global economic downturn, Scruton makes a counterintuitive yet persuasive case that optimists and idealists -- with their ignorance about the truths of human nature and human society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed -- have wrought havoc for centuries. Scruton's argument is nuanced, however, and his preference for pessimism is not a dark view of human nature; rather his is a 'hopeful pessimism' which urges that instead of utopian efforts to reform human society or human nature, we focus on the only reform that we can truly master -- the improvement of ourselves through the cultivation of our better instincts. Written in Scruton's trademark style-- erudite, sweeping in scope across centuries and cultures, and unafraid to offend-- this book is sure to intrigue and provoke readers concerned with the state of Western culture, the nature of human beings, and the question of whether social progress is truly possible.
Download or read book Cultural Pessimism written by Oliver Bennett and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and wide-ranging analysis of the cultural mood of anxiety and pessimism in the early 21st century.
Download or read book A Feeling of Wrongness written by Joseph Packer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction. Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.
Download or read book A Longing Like Despair written by Alan Grob and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major aim of Grob's study is to show Arnold as poet to be possessed of far greater philosophic depth and subtlety than his critics have usually credited him with by identifying the deep affinities and shared weltanschauung of his poetic vision with the metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer, the major European philosopher whose insistence on the cosmic opposition between the world as will and the world as idea provided the most important philosophic alternative in the nineteenth century to the age's otherwise dominant progressive historicism."--Jacket.
Download or read book Dark Matters written by Mara van der Lugt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes a compelling case for the rediscovery of pessimism as a source for compassion, consolation, and perhaps even hope. Bringing to life one of the most vibrant eras in the history of philosophy, Mara van der Lugt discusses legendary figures such as Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer. She also introduces readers to less familiar names, such as Bayle, King, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. Van der Lugt describes not only how the earliest optimists and pessimists were deeply concerned with finding an answer to the question of the value of existence that does justice to the reality of human suffering, but also how they were fundamentally divided over what such an answer should look like. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's leading scholars, Dark Matters reveals how the crucial moral aim of pessimism is to find a way of speaking about suffering that offers consolation and does justice to the fragility of life.
Download or read book Cosmic Pessimism written by Eugene Thacker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”
Download or read book Afropessimism written by Frank B. Wilderson III and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wilderson’s thinking teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge”—Fred Moten Praised as “a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy” (Aaron Robertson,?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an argument we can no longer ignore, Wilderson insists that we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of memoir, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.“Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. . . . Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity.”—Paul C. Taylor, Washington Post
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer written by Robert L. Wicks and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though known primarily as a herald of philosophical pessimism, the full range of Schopenhauer's contributions is displayed here in a collection of thirty-one essays on the forefront of Schopenhauer scholarship. The essays explore his central notions, including the will, empirical knowledge, and the sublime, and widens to the interplay of ethics and religion with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Authors confront difficult aspects of Schopenhauer's work and legacy - for example, the extent to which Schopenhauer adopted ideas from his predecessors compared to how much was original and visionary in his central claim that reality is a blind, senseless 'will,' the effectiveness of his philosophy in the field of scientific explanation and extrasensory phenomena, and the role of beauty and sublimity in his outlook.--
Download or read book The Politics of Pessimism in Ecclesiastes written by Mark R. Sneed and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2012-02-27 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars attempt to resolve the problem of the book of Ecclesiastes’ heterodox character in one of two ways, either explaining away the book’s disturbing qualities or radicalizing and championing it as a precursor of modern existentialism. This volume offers an interpretation of Ecclesiastes that both acknowledges the unorthodox nature of Qoheleth’s words and accounts for its acceptance among the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible. It argues that, instead of being the most secular and modern of biblical books, Ecclesiastes is perhaps one of the most religious and primitive. Bringing a Weberian approach to Ecclesiastes, it represents a paradigm of the application of a social-science methodology.
Download or read book Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth Century France written by Joseph Acquisto and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the emergence of modern pessimism in nineteenth-century France and examines its aesthetic, epistemological, ethical, and political implications. It explores how, since pessimism as a worldview is not empirically verifiable, writers on pessimism shift the discussion to verisimilitude, opening up rich territory for cross-fertilization between philosophy and literature. The book traces debates on pessimism in the nineteenth century among French nonfiction writers who either lauded its promotion of compassion or condemned it for being a sick and unliveable attempt at renunciation. It then examines the way novelists and poets take up and transform these questions by portraying characters in lived situations that serve as testing grounds for the merits or limitations of pessimism. The debate on pessimism that emerged in the nineteenth century is still very much with us, and this book offers an interhistorical argument for embracing pessimism as a way of living well in the world, aesthetically, ethically, and politically.
Download or read book Pessimism in Literature written by Edward Morgan Forster and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book We Are Doomed written by John Derbyshire and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To his fellow conservatives, John Derbyshire makes a plea: Don't be seduced by this nonsense about "the politics of hope." Skepticism, pessimism, and suspicion of happy talk are the true characteristics of an authentically conservative temperament. And from Hobbes and Burke through Lord Salisbury and Calvin Coolidge, up to Pat Buchanan and Mark Steyn in our own time, these beliefs have kept the human race from blindly chasing its utopian dreams right off a cliff. Recently, though, various comforting yet fundamentally idiotic notions of political correctness and wishful thinking have taken root beyond the "Kumbaya"-singing, we're-all-one crowd. These ideas have now infected conservatives, the very people who really should know better. The Republican Party has been derailed by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks. Think rescuing the economy by condemning our descendents to lives of spirit-crushing debt. Think nation-building abroad while we slowly disintegrate at home. Think education and No Child Left Behind. . . . But don't think about it too much, because if you do, you'll quickly come to the logical conclusion: We are doomed. Need more convincing? Dwell on the cheerful promises of the diversity cult and the undeniable reality of the oncoming demographic disaster. Contemplate the feminization of everything, or take a good look at what passes for art these days. Witness the rise of culturism and the death of religion. Bow down before your new master, the federal apparatchik. Finally, ask yourself: How certain am I that the United States of America will survive, in any recognizable form, until, say, 2022? A scathing, mordantly funny romp through today's dismal and dismaler political and cultural scene, We Are Doomed provides a long-overdue dose of reality, revealing just how the GOP has been led astray in recent years–and showing that had conservatives held on to their fittingly pessimistic outlook, America's future would be far brighter. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to embrace the Audacity of Hopelessness.
Download or read book Infinite Resignation written by Eugene Thacker and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Scholarly advice for dark times.” —The New Yorker “Provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company.” —New York Times “Probably philosophy’s only beach read.” —Vice A ‘nihilist’s devotional,’ this collection aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human condition Dark times lie around us and ahead of us, and what better way to survive the coming Apocolypse than by immersing yourself in some of the greatest thinkers on pessimism, brought together with his own thoughts on the subject by Eugene Thacker, author of the contemporary classic, In the Dust of This Planet. Comprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it often is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. Reflecting on the universe’s “looming abyss of indifference,” Thacker explores the pessimism of a range of philosophers, from the well-known (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus), to the lesser-known (E.M. Cioran, Lev Shestov, Miguel de Unamuno). Readers will find food for thought in Thacker’s handling of a range of themes in Christianity and Buddhism, as well as his engagement with literary figures (from Dostoevsky to Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, and Fernando Pessoa), whose pessimism about the world both inspires and depresses Thacker. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, Infinite Resignation is a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.
Download or read book Reimagining Life written by Raihan Kadri and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reimagining Life, Raihan Kadri presents a pioneering critical history of the epistemological and theoretical origins of the Surrealist movement and its subsequent legacy. The book contains extensive examination and new interpretations of the oft-neglected theoretical writing of Surrealists such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, and Salvador Dalí, in order to demonstrate how Surrealism is connected to a broader lineage of philiosophical pessimism-involving such figures as Fredrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Arthur Rimbaud-which Kadri argues represents a particular strain of modernism aimed at breaking human thought away from the constraints of religion and other forms of idealism in order to expand the possibilities for knowledge and human freedom. The innovative, wide-ranging study deftly traverses fields of art, politics, philosophy, psychology, and literature. Reimagining Life redefines Surrealism's place in modern intellectual history and offers a new vision of how Surrealist discourse can be connected to contemporary debates in cultural, critical, and theoretical studies.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer written by Christopher Janaway and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-10-13 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is something of a maverick figure in the history of philosophy. He produced a unique theory of the world and human existence based upon his notion of will. This collection analyses the related but distinct components of will from the point of view of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. This volume explores Schopenhauer's philosophy of death, his relationship to the philosophy of Kant, his use of ideas drawn from both Buddhism and Hinduism, and the important influence he exerted on Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein.
