by wormius | 2025-05-23 17:29:45+00:00
How much of pessimist philosophy have you actually read? Have you gone back to the German 1800s philosophers? Do you only know Schopenhauer and Mainlander? What about Schelling, Horstmann, Bahnsen, von Hartmann, Zapffe, Cioran? Or to a less pessimist extent but for some reason listed on wiki, Gautama Buddha, or existentialists like Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre? LOL they have Nietzsche listed as a pessimist. As if.

A solid overview is the book Welzschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy

https://archive.org/details/frederick-c.-beiser-weltschmerz-...

I've been reading Zapffe a bit off and on recently which feels the most "accessible" out of the bit I've seen (I've read some Mainlander (but all the translations are very difficult and dense; I think the one I bought on Amazon is actually not as good as the one you can find on reddit, which feels more appropriately philosophically minded, or maybe the heaviness/specificity of the transliteration makes me dig/read harder than the more fluent prose of the one English version on Amazon, published the past couple years). Thacker feels a bit too light to me, but seems to be more a 'popularizer' but also abstract I wouldn't necessarily recommend him.

Ligotti's book on the topic (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) is bleak but very well written and accessible, it's where I got the start to read more and delve into it as a philosophy.

Personally I don't find Byung-Chul Han that compelling, and maybe it's the translations. I admit I only found a sample chapter, and maybe it just dropped me in the middle where I had no context, but it felt very, as you imply, flowery and abstract.

There's a variety of pessimist writers, and I wouldn't lump them all in with this particular writer, just because you find his work empty.

There's also Anti-Natalist authors who contribute to the pessimist orientation, though I'm not listing them here as I'm not as familiar with their work, but they also have a bit of an older lineage despite it seeming like a newer orientation.

Anyways, if you seriously mean these questions and want to know, asking in a tech forum is probably not the best place, but it can point you to some good starting points, which I hope I have done.

I, personally, am pessimist to my bone, from experience. That doesn't mean people who aren't are invalid. They have a different outlook due to their experiences, and whatever constitutions they have. But I will say reading about pessimism from the heavier thinkers has allowed me to put my finger on things (even if I can't put my tongue to explain the details) in a way that I hadn't seen before, and helped me understand my own interior making.

I wasn't always like this, I was a hopeful, youthful libertarian then socialist, and while hopeful, still, I don't retain it as a likely outcome. Some people are cosmic pessimists, some are more immediate pessimists, some only see it as a personal emotive choice (that's less philosophy than state of mind) but others do see an overarching bleakness in life, despite the beauty all around. Some may even find comfort in pessimism, in known that "one day too, this(they) shall pass".