“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”
~ "On the Sufferings of the World" by Arthur Schopenhauer
"Great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering."
~ "On Suicide" by Arthur Schopenhauer
This dis-ease with modernity, experienced psychologically and physiologically, stems from the modern conception of time as a linear progression. Hegel articulated at length the necessary progression of humanity as conceived through linear time.
Unlike the more ancient view of a circular and thus eternal time, Hegel argued for a linear temporal progression to absolute knowledge. Hegel's optimism first appears in Leibniz's notion of "the best of all possible worlds"--which Voltaire brilliantly parodies in Candide. Diverging from Hegel and Leibniz, Schopenhauer astutely argues for "the worst of all possible worlds", and in his articulation of the world we see optimism's ugly sister--pessimism.
The sufferings of the mind and body are not actually distinct. If a body feels pain to a significant degree suddenly or over a period of time, the psyche complements the body in its physical reality. They work in tandem. In terms of pleasure and pain, mind and body are extensions of each other--as are will and representation. There is a slight temporal disconnect between mind and body coexistent with its respective objectification of the will. This permutation of body and mind finds its analog in subject and object.
My psyche & physiology react with modernity as if it were an allergy, manifesting as modern maladies: asthma, hay fever, and comorbid psychological disorders--including, homosexuality. (NB: The last of which is no longer recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a disorder, but it certainly constitutes a dis-ease.) This allergy and dis-ease with modernity is coincidentally revealed by modern means, that is, by medical diagnosis and a blog. Thus--in me--modernity finds its own cause and effect.
“If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.”
~ William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
(That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism,
a classical type—this premonition and vision belongs to me as inseparable from
me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only the word
"classical" offends my ears, it is far too trite and has become round
and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future—for it comes! I see it
coming!—Dionysian pessimism.)
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
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