Thomas Ligotti’s Rhetorical Strategies as a Weird Pessimist

After Poe and Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti was an inheritor of a decadent “tradition of cynicism, morbidity, and pessimism from the eighteenth-century works of authors like Sade, Chamfort, and La Rochefoucauld”. Ligotti in an interview would say of this tradition “This is the form of Decadence that has always interested me–the freedom, after thousands of years under the whip of uplifting religions and the tyrannical politics of the positive–which are nothing more than a means for crowd control–to speak to others who in their hearts could no longer lie to themselves about what they thought concerning the value, or rather lack of value, of human life.”2

In their work on popular forms of pessimism Joseph Packer and Ethan A. Stoneman – A Feeling of Wrongness suggest that,

“Thomas Ligotti is perhaps the first to make an explicit contribution to the philosophy of pessimism, which he did in 2010 with The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. In it, he describes his weird fiction and weird fiction in general as constituting a more or less thought-out strategy to spread pessimistic ideas. Building on Ligotti’s insight, this chapter maintains that weird fiction serves as something of a pessimistic Trojan horse: while promising a simple scary tale, it works to invoke in the reader a sense of uncanny fear and in ways that call into question the very nature of reality. But rather than presenting well-reasoned arguments in support of explicit pessimistic claims, weird fiction manifests or enacts pessimism, aesthetically, through the clever deployment of a range of stylistic devices and rhetorical maneuvers. What is more, by invoking the sense of the uncanny, such rhetorical tactics work to undermine the common psychological defenses of anchoring, thereby disrupting our ability to comprehend the world in terms of a coherent narrative. In so doing, they transform what would otherwise remain merely strange into an effective hostility against the world, against life, and against meaning.”

They offer four inroads into Weird Fiction as a Pessimism, saying,

“First (1) that weird fiction, by masquerading as a source of pleasant distraction, attracts an audience that might not be inclined to pick up a work by a Schopenhauer or a Zapffe; (2) that, by subtly blurring the line between the natural and the supernatural, weird fiction weakens readers’ inclination to isolate and, hence, neutralize the pessimistic undertones of any given weird tale; (3) that weird fiction’s monstrous aberrations destabilize the conceptual-ontological categories of space and time, knowing, and performing, all of which serve to anchor human beings’ feelings of existential security, both in the world and in their own skin; and (4) that the very structure of weird fiction inhibits audiences from sublimating the uncannily horrific into a life-affirming experience.”

Thomas Ligotti on his Pessimism:

“My pessimism doesn’t have a metaphysical basis like Schopenhauer’s Will-to-Live, which I never understood as a reading of the universe that would necessarily lead one to a grim view of life. To me, it seems closely related to Bergson’s elan vital. At the same time, I’ve used the idea of anima mundi in a few stories to represent the same kind of driving force as the Will-to-Live, with the difference that it’s a personal evil not an indifferent type of energy that makes the world move as it does. Schopenhauer’s Will-to-Live is as difficult to swallow as any other monist explanation for everything. … I couldn’t care less about metaphysical matters that are so monumentally inevident. Then again, most of us would say the same about philosophical pessimism, whose sole contention is that the suffering of sentient beings absolutely negates the value of life. One can only agree or disagree with this philosophy. The foundation of pessimism is not a matter of logic or truth except when it ventures into matters of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, morality, or any of the other areas of interest that philosophers see as their remit and purpose. And most pessimists do venture into these matters, if only to provide an answer to why life is as awful as they judge it to be. … Perhaps the only element that overrides our hunger for conflict is our preoccupation with continued individual and collective existence. In the end, this could prove to be as unpromising a project as antinatalism, considering the many ways we’ve invented to end ourselves either on purpose or by accident. Of course, all this is only my opinion of how things are with us. Such an opinion might have led me into misanthropy, but it didn’t. I may have said once or twice that I’d like to unmake or destroy the universe. But I don’t see how that casts me as a misanthrope. It’s just the grandiose aspiration of an ordinary pessimist.

—Thomas Ligotti and Xavier Aldana Reyes (June 2019)

---

1. Packer, Joseph; Stoneman, Ethan. A Feeling of Wrongness (Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture) (pp. 35-36). Penn State University Press.
2. The Ligotti Outtakes – From Correspondence 06/ 2004 – 09/ 2004 By: Neddal Ayad & Thomas Ligotti

Schopenhauer’s Ethics of Compassion

Schopenhauer’s Ethics of Compassion

“Instead, focus alone on his suffering, his distress, his fear, his pain— then you will always feel kinship with him, sympathize with him and instead of hatred or contempt sense that compassion for him which alone is agape, and to which we are exhorted by the gospels. (Schopenhauer, PP.II.184) “

This brings him close to the Gnostics when Schopenhauer suggests that if we begin to ‘conceive of the world as the work of our own guilt, therefore as something that it were better did not exist’ (PP.II.271), then we can accustom ourselves to ‘regarding this world as a place of penance, hence as a prison, a penal colony as it were, a labour camp’ (PP.II.272). Some of the Gnostics would conceive of this world and universe as hell, as a prison within which we are enslaved and trapped by the dark Archons of the blind and merciless Demiurge. The result of such a perception would not be despair or immorality, but rather an attitude of deep sympathy and compassion for our ‘fellow-sufferer[s]’:

“In fact, the conviction that the world and therefore also mankind is something that actually should not be, is designed to fill us with forbearance towards one another, for what can be expected of beings in such a predicament? Indeed, from this point of view one could arrive at the notion that the really proper mode of address between human beings…”

The crucial concept in morality, for Schopenhauer, is Mitleid: pity, sympathy, compassion. This is the strangely disquieting resemblance to Buddhism in his work. Why not indifference? This is what Shakespeare’s thought ultimately leads too.

“… And look upon, as if the tragedy
Were play’d in jest by counterfeiting actors”
(King Henry VI, part 3, act 2, sc. 3)

If everything is ‘dukka’ (suffering) and our world is maya-shakti-deva the realm of delusion and illusion, then what does the suffering of the other mean to me? One should neither envy or suffer another’s pain or guilt but rather develop that stoic awareness of complete indifference. The indifference to which I refer is not some bland idiocy of not caring, but of knowing the truth of the matter and acting on it not out of some emotion of pity or compassion but out of one’s experiential truth. This whole need to ‘show’ compassion for the earth, animals, humans, etc. leads to false attachments and mixed emotions. This emotion of ‘pity’ is a sign of accepting that something about existence matters, is real, is worth one’s time and investment. But if this is so then one is not a pessimist in the strict sense of the word, but something else. Caring for another is just a matter of truth rather than pity. One sees a fellow human or animal in pain, one just helps alleviate their misery not because one feels pity but that one too suffers from such pain and suffering but knows the truth of it and also knows that the alleviation of such misery and pain is a good from personal experience. Ethics cannot in the secular atheistic framework of which pessimism is the philosophy base morality on pity, compassion, or sympathy but rather on experiential (a posteriori) truth and knowledge.

Schopenhauer’s Theodicy?

Schopenhauer against any Christian sense of guilt and retribution would align himself with the older paganism of the Greeks in the sense of tragic debt,

“Far from bearing the character of a gift, human existence has entirely the character of a contracted debt. The calling in of this debt appears in the shape of the urgent needs, tormenting desires, and endless misery brought about through that existence. As a rule, the whole lifetime is used for paying off this debt, yet in this way only the interest is cleared off. Repayment of the capital takes place through death. And when was this debt contracted? At the begetting. (WWR.II.580)”

This sense that we are born into existence cursed and in debt, that our sojourn in this ‘vale of tears’ is itself a punishment incurred not from some god(s) before we were born but in the very moment of being born itself. Much like Zizek’s rendition of the ‘appearance of appearance’ there is nothing behind the screen, no big bad boy meeting out punishment. No it’s just the natural process of being in Being, existence itself as a debt. We are all guilty of existence tout court. Blind necessity and the drive (trieb) mercilessly strives with itself as strife and conflict producing this void of our inexistence in time – being those beings that never are complete in ourselves, but always striving toward that thing we cannot be. Driven forward on an impossible mission in an unceasing roller-coaster going nowhere.
Schopenhauer’s sophistry comes out as he sees this supposed universal debt: “If we wish to measure the degree of guilt with which our existence itself is burdened, let us look at the suffering connected with it. Every great pain, whether bodily or mental, states what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it. (WWR.II.580)”

How could we deserve suffering? This is ludicrous. This seems to me Schopenhauer going mad unable to find an actual natural explanation and realizing that there is no answer. So he begins falling into sophistry… mixing Christian (Augustinian) and Pagan (Greek) thought in some ludicrous mish-mash as prelude to his redemptive message. Sadly, this is pathetic on his part.

Even Mara van der Lugt who I’ve quoted in previous posts says,

“How can Schopenhauer suppose that his notion of natural guilt makes the fabric of the world ultimately just or justified in any meaningful way? It is one thing to speak of debt or guilt—it is quite another to speak of justice, let alone of justification, as he does in this passage:

“The justification [Rechtfertigung] for suffering is the fact that the will affirms itself even in this phenomenon; and this affirmation is justified and balanced by the fact that the will bears the suffering. (WWR.I.331)”
This whole notion that we deserve our suffering is madness itself. Schopenhauer has worked himself into a werid theodicy that seems to strip Augustinian theology into a secular atheism without god. An Atheology more akin to the Gnostics, but without their god… yet, as we will see later maybe the Gnostic notion is not so far off since he will seek a form of atheistic redemption. Since for him the Will-to-Live is the deep diver of his cosmos then as van der Lugt puts it: “Original sin, then, is nothing other than the affirmation of the will-to-live, which is the deeper cause of all our sufferings: it is by affirming our will-to-live that we are capable of suffering at all.”

f Milton wrote the great Christian poem to “justify the ways of God to man,” then Schopenhauer seems to have sought to write the great philosophy to justify the ways of Dike and Necessity to secular atheists as the new gospel of suffering, guilt, and consolation. Strange waters we dip into here…

Schopenhauer recognises this problem at several points in the Parerga in particular, where he asks: ‘To what end this tormented, fearful will in thousands of forms without the freedom to redemption which is conditioned by soundness of mind?’ Schopenhauer’s answer is uncharacteristically hesitant: ‘the will to life must devour its own flesh . . . , and it is a hungry will’; furthermore, ‘the capacity for suffering in animals is much smaller than in mankind’ (PP.II.290–1; his emphasis). (Mara van der Lugt: Dark Matters, 370). As he’ll suggest in another passage in the Parerga: “the capacity for pain would have to reach its zenith only where the possibility for negation of the will is present, by virtue of reason and its soundness of mind. For without this, the capacity for pain would be nothing but a pointless cruelty.”

Lugt in her assay adds: “Schopenhauer’s theodicean instinct arises exactly at this point: life is suffering, but this suffering is neither pointless nor cruel, since there is a way out. Ultimately, therefore, the creature has no just complaint. To which a Bayle or a Hume might object: Why could it not be a ‘pointless cruelty’ that we suffer as we do? Is it not precisely the case that we often suffer, and suffer undeservedly, without a way out of suffering? Is this not precisely what decides the tragic nature of our existence? (Dark Matters, 371).

I would say with Bayle and Hume that there can be no atheistic justification for this Schopenhauerian theodicy of redemption, no consolation or redemptive vision but that truly existence is ‘pointless’ and ‘cruel’ through and through. Oh, sure, we find pockets of reprieve in Zappfe’s quartet of isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation (in art, etc.) but these are only temporary remedies not abiding consolations or redemptive visions that are permanent. Most of our existence is drudgery, work, mindless repetition, and endless cruelty as we struggle with boredom, apathy, and the dark contours of the aging process into dissolution, decay, and eventual death. Of course, most humans on this planet opt out for some kind of illusory system of god(s) to assuage their dismay at being born into such a suffering world. Who could blame them? I can’t. But I cannot abide in their delusions of some redeemer either. They will of course rebuff me and call me a sinner, atheist, and devil. Let them. I live and was born the same as they, and I’m free to use my mind, imagination, and thought just as they do but for me it is without the need for some illusory justification of sin and guilt and debt. I just am. That is enough.

Pessimism: Why pessimism matters so much to Schopenhauer?

The sun will not transgress his measures. If he does, the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find him out.

One must realize that war is shared and Strife is Justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict.

War is father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.

—Heraclitus, The Fragments

In her work ‘Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering’ Mara van der Lugt will ask of Schopenhauer:

So much for the technical basis of Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism. A dif­ferent way of approaching this part of his philosophy is to ask why pessimism matters so much to Schopenhauer. After all, while he is acutely aware of earlier pessimists, Schopenhauer is not reacting explicitly to theodicy as Bayle and Voltaire were, and he believes theodicean optimism to have been well refuted by thinkers such as Voltaire and Hume. Why, then, is pessimism so crucial for Schopenhauer? Why is it pessimism that is presented as a kind of climax to his entire system? In other words: Why pessimism at all?

She will find three reasons for this. First, that pessimism for Schopenhauer is “true”. “When he cites the tragic poets, it is because he believes they were right in describing a world of suffering. Hume and Voltaire are seen to win out over Leibniz and Rousseau not because their arguments were cleverer, but because of the overwhelming descriptive and explanatory power of pessimism over optimism.” Second, “less obvious reason behind Schopenhauer’s pessimism has to do with a moral drive that, while less evident in Schopenhauer than in other pessimists, is present nonetheless.” She goes on to explain,

“Schopenhauer is not a nihilist or a fatalist, and his pessimism is not born from a Nietzschean impulse to do away with morality, or sympathy, or truth. Schopenhauer believes that there is a deeply redemptive as well as didactic value to pessimism: that this philosophy is able to offer, on the individual level, a prospect of consolation or even redemption, and, on the social level, a powerful motivation for moral improvement. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, therefore, cannot rightly be understood without also understanding its connection with consolation and redemption on the individual level, and to ethics on the social.”
And, finally, Schopenhauer’s sense of ‘eternal justice’: “Deep within the heart of

Schopenhauer’s antitheodicean enterprise there occurs what seems to be a theodicean moment: an almost Augustinian-sounding justification of suffering by way of guilt, which for Schopenhauer is crucial to the very project of pessimism. This justification, which draws equally from Christian and pagan sources, is perhaps one of the most curious aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—and this too is essential for understanding the deeper mechanics of his philosophical project.”

My own view on his sense of justice is more aligned with his readings of Heraclitus and Hesiod. Heraclitus’ political doctrine can be seen as a development of Hesiod’s old insight, that the order allotted by Zeus to mankind is to follow justice and shun violence: ‘for to fish and beasts and winged birds he gave the rule (nomos) that they eat one another, since there is no justice among them; but to human beings he gave justice (dike). Of course, Dike is the Greek mythological goddess of justice and the spirit of moral order and fair judgement as a transcendent universal ideal or based on immemorial custom, in the sense of socially enforced norms and conventional rules. According to Hesiod (Theogony, l. 901), she was fathered by Zeus upon his second consort, Themis. She and her mother are both personifications of justice. She is depicted as a young, slender woman carrying a balance scale and wearing a laurel wreath. The constellation Libra (the Scales) was anciently thought to represent her distinctive symbol. In our modern rendition of this notion is the lady of blind justice we see in the courtrooms across the world, this inevitability of a dark presage and cosmic justice running through things that in the end though blind works itself out. I would add this sense of necessity as central to this blind truth. As Charles H. Kahn in his fine study of Heraclitus will suggest of Dike and Justice,

“Heraclitus’ restatement of this traditional view marks the birth of political philosophy proper and the beginnings of the theory of natural law, which will receive its classic statement by the Stoics working under his inspiration. Heraclitus’ own formulation is novel in three respects. He generalizes the notion of Justice to apply to every manifestation of cosmic order, including the rule of the jungle by which birds and beasts eat one another (LXXXII, D. 80). Secondly, human law is conceived as the unifying principle of the political community, and thus as grounded in the rational order of nature which unifies the cosmos. Finally, the unique status of human nomos and the political order is interpreted as a consequence of the common human possession of speech (logos) and understanding (noos), that is, as a consequence of the rational capacity to communicate one’s thoughts and come to an agreement (homologein in XXXVI, D. 50, echoing xyn legontas in XXX, D. 114).”

Pessimism’s Central Insight

“Life is a constant process of dying.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Life is Suffering.”
― Buddha

The inevitability of suffering decline, decay, dissolution and eventual death is the central insight of the pessimistic traditions. This age-old battle between life and death, entropy and negentropy is played out in every aspect of the universe from the birth and death of stars to the smallest particles that arise and then decay into inexistence. The ancient Taoists in their naturalist philosophies would see it as a pattern to be discerned in shadow and light, the eternal round of these vast spiraling forces in never-ending combat. Parmenides’ suspicion regarding matter inevitably lent support to the suspicions brought to bear on every aspect of Thought and Being. Heraclitus would see the cosmic order as never-ending strife “the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.” In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche tells the ancient story of King Midas hunting in the forest for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus. At last, after many years, the King manages to capture him and asks what is the best and most desirable thing for man. Silenus maintains a surly silence until, goaded by the King, he bursts out with a contemptuous laugh and says, “Oh, wretched ephemeral race … why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”