Pic related absolutely crushed me. I have no desire to do anything anymore or for fight for anyone...

It's a mixture of nihilism and pessimism

It doesn't really advocate antinatalism because it doesn't advocate anything, seeing as nobody has any free will and everything is just a nightmare that will keep unfolding regardless

I'll just have to read it for myself and see how it goes, I guess.

How do you know there is no answer?

Lol, threads like this make me laugh. Atheist faggots getting what they want.

You don't have to be of a great philosophical or intellectual mind to realize that life is inconsequential to the greater universe, or even the planet. Even your country.

Your actions in life may have consequences, may be filled with actions and reactions, but life, consciousness, all of the material and immaterial possessions humans hold are meaningless to the ebb and flow of gravity, solar flares, supervolcanos, etc.

Depends on how you treat time and entropy.

>everything is just a nightmare
BECAUSE YOU A BITCH (HEADS CONFIRM)Coin Flip: Tails

Rekt

Found this to be a dull, unsatisfying read, a less interesting Schopenhauer/Cioran.

Heads confirm that user was projecting his BITCH statusCoin Flip: Tails

This book was worth reading just for the fact that I found out about Mainlander through it

No. I respect Ligotti as a thinker but the prose in here is textbook thesaurus cornucopia. I guess this is what happens when a fiction writer decides to make a philosophical treatise.

Why is something you can't even experience and is irrelevant to you, more important than what you can or anything else? There is nothing but your moment-to-moment awareness, so why is everything but it getting the importance? Why is anything getting more importance than anything else? Why would I care about the universe, planet, or my country over my friends, family, and my own mind?

I read this book a few months ago. It has absolutely destroyed me and is always in the back of my mind.
It's not even like the book really teaches you anything you don't already know deep down. It just says it.

If you haven't read this book, don't. Just don't.

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cuck detected; read nietzsche subhuman

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I read the first hundred or so pages before getting a little bored and dropping it. It comes off hella pretentious but it's fun and fits his tone. Someone here once described it as "philosophical horror" which I feel is appropriate. Sometimes he goes too tryhard and it feels very hamfisted though.

>"why do we exist" is conclusively "there is no answer".
Get into Tarot, see spiritual interaction, understand that belief-entities (such as 'time', 'faeries', 'mammon' etc. have cultivated humans for generations, selectively breeding us).

There isn't much of an additional insight found in this 200 page book that Zappfe didn't express under 4 pages of The Last Messiah. At least the book honestly admits that the basic gist is the same
>sentience BAD
>everything you do is COPE
the rest is just Ligotti actively shitting on everything there is to shit on. On Nietzsche, on Tolstoy, on Hollywood movies, on politicians, on science, on society as a whole (who are the main perpertators of eponymous conspiracy). Reading the book I got the impression that Ligotti considers maybe like 5 people throughout history less than fucking retarded - Zappfe, Schopenhauer, Lovecraft, Poe, that indian dude who reached nirvana by suffering brain damage, several writers of doomer lit

Why do you think "meaning" is in any way applicable to unconscious matter

fagCoin Flip: Tails

You must be a colossally weak faggot if a bunch of words on a paper did that to you.

How does Tarot help explain why we exist?

>belief-entities
Tell more please. Can I find more just researching Tarot?

>divination with a poker deck is like ancient spirits interacting with me mayn.
>*takes huge bong rip*

God I hate you fucks. The actual Tarot card game is good though if you like games like Euchre. Actually it is probably closer to Rook in style if I remember correctly. Would recommend.

Hell if you looked like Ligotti you'd wish you were dead too.

OP, you realise this is a horror novel presented as a non-fiction book and not an actual philosophy text, right? Did you become an optimist after reading the Chronicles of Narnia? Did you become charitable after reading a Christmas Carol? It's a fucking novel.

>not restructuring your entire worldview after reading a book
Someone isn't leading a literary lifestyle.

goes a lot further than that.

no, the other replies are spot on. you can look at it as him playing a character, but it's still such a dense and tedious one. i could not handle more than 20pgs a day without dozing off, such a long 300-odd pages. it gets better towards the end.

i can't believe anyone found it so demoralizing, the prose was so purple i just thought it came off as whiny and incessant. although he constantly defends himself of this critique throughout the novel
> eeuuuuuuu youre not one of the PESSIMISTS so you wouldnt UNDERSTAND
he is aware of how tedious his ranting is to those who do not empathize. for the times in reading that i was up for following his train of thought, he is really self-consistent, self-aware, insightful and well-thought-out in his reasoning. its still a pita though.

>the answer to the most important qestions ever namely "why do we exist" is conclusively "there is no answer".

Dumb atheist

I read Labyrinths by Borges after I read Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Ligotti and it really hammered home to me how shit of a writer Ligotti is. Like a depressed nihilist teenager tried doing a horror themed Labyrinths fanfic

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shit that's exactly what id expect of him

I remember reading the one about the infinite library and all I could think while I was reading it was "this is what Ligotti would write if he wasn't a crybaby moron"

So basically read this instead of ligotti

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Reading it now. Its quite good and , similar to Cioran, it's a nice comfortable read for the pessimist. I think it's a mistake for anyone to believe that Ligotti is attempting anything approaching philosophy here; there are no real metaphysics or ethics. Its merely a survey of the history of pessimism and tries to highlight that though they are in the vast minority, it is no less rational to assume that it is better not to have existed than to assert the opposite. It provides consolation to the soul inclined toward pessimism and makes a point of arguing that it is not so silly an outlook to have. Treat it like a very long-form persuasive essay

>the answer to the most important qestions ever namely "why do we exist" is conclusively "there is no answer".
Why do we exist is the wrong question, go read UG Krishnamurti the guy that Ligotti references in the book, there's nothing special about consciousness, we are like computers with predetermined responses, the question arises out of some kind of egocentrism or thinking that we are special.

While we are clearly insignificant in scale and our actions hold little legitimate meaning on the grand scheme, that doesn't mean that there is no reason for why we were created or no sort of deeper meaning to existence itself.

Why all the Borges recs in here?

it's just a bad cioran knockoff but a sort of good bad cioran knockoff

3.6/5

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You've been succesfully brainwashed by a brainlet with an agenda.
My reaction roba This book was to laugh, pray and go say thank you to my parents for having me.

Yes

Not him, but damn, user... You gotta take the magick pill. Realise your entire existence is in this one dimension, that there is something that lurks in the primordial muck that absorbs any remaining consciousness you'll seep out when you die.

Atheism is not synonymous with nihilism and despair, in fact, an Atheist should have an even stronger desire for life than religious people, since we are completely unrestrained in our journey to complete knowledge and pursuit of pleasure in existence. This of course manifest itself in abject horror, but this abjection is the source man's greatest pleasure - to be in ecstasy during the fall into the abyss. And I, as an Atheist, will tell you exactly what I want: Existence maximized.

>"I'm not coping"
>Proceeds to cope by accusing a lack of purpose
Whack

redeemed

Pretty sure Ligotti says outright in the book that he cares not for constructing any philosophical systems or convincing anyone. He even says that philosophers and men of science are malicious.

Because he is an actual good writer. Read the circular ruins.

Read it 2 years ago and I liked it, as much as you can enjoy a book that professes the futility of human life.

I agree though, it's not very well written. It's not something you'll binge in a day.

Because Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe is a poor Labyrinths fanfic

this book made my cousin kill himself. its fiction baka

What is is reasoning on this?

Philosophy- the science of difference and enumeration- is a disease and we can look at the “progress” of philosophy as a viral contagion. As we all know, Philosophy begins in earnest with Plato. The central concern of the dialogues (themselves a capture mechanism whereby the “oral” tradition is contained within what would begin the expansion/contagion of the first fully standardized, internal, highly abstract, economical, phonemic/atomistic representational exogrammic model) is “what is x in and of itself?”.

This archetypal question is advanced with much rigor and is indeed the archetypal question. This question gives rise to what I call “the problem of meaning”. Meaning is a new category arising in ancient thought and meaning itself arises with its necessary (ananke) organ- the soul. This archetypal questioning can be seen as “symptomatic” of exposure to something, thus it is a problem to be solved not by advancing the cause of philosophy but by seeking a cure. The Pharmakos, Logos and the Savior are all attempts at various times answers stages to contain and or cure philosophy. As a side note, Hegel is the AIDS of philosophy. The arising of what is x for itself is the “birth of the problem of meaning”.

Debord was a voyeurs voyeur and thus a radically incomplete thinker. Trapped within the completion phase of Cartesian/Newtonian/materialist voyeurism, Debord was unable to see the sorcerous aspect of his own compulsions. In other words he didn’t go far enough, deep enough, surreal enough in his contemplations.

There is a reason why the logos and light and vision and linear time and Utopianism and industrialism and Cartesianism and voyeurism reign supreme in the west.

Does this shit address the hard problem of consciousness? Because it doesn't say much if it doesn't

The metaphysical status of consciousness doesn't matter that much if free will doesn't exist and we are just pointless biological robots(which is Ligotti's stance). Who cares if its emergent, or if the panpsychists are right or whatever other position.

Read the Upanishads. The Dhammapada instead if you’re not satisfied with feel good metaphysics. It’ll all be okay, user. Observations of the world depend on the observer.

this book cheered me up desu, made me feel less alone in my pessimism.

Does reading him make one not want to hara-kiri?

And yet you don't actually feel that way. You tell yourself you do and post on Yea Forums all day. Enjoy that maximized "existence" faggot.

There is an answer, but its not what most people want to hear.

Tell me.

It does if I remember correctly, but he doesn't reach to any conclusion that had never been mentioned by previous philosophers.

This also goes for everything presented in the book. You're not going to find anything really original, what Ligotti does best is just making those ideas a bit more palatable for the general audience.

so, you can still revel in self-satisfactions and fulfillment thanks to our animal programming. Nothing needs a meaning, being "deep" is for losers.

>I want to have no purpose because that way I win
if you don't grow, you rot. You will realize the world is moving on without you and it will actually crush you. Listen to my warning user, your conclusion and your life has already been lived thousands of times. Or maybe you're just meant to be an NPC.

What is it then

Jesus Christ is pure Lord and Savior who died for our sins

Epic

How would you know?

I‘d rather take the panpsychist belief because „I“ experienced that at least. I never experienced the Christian version of Jesus

I have

>being so weak willed you can get crushed by a book
Read Kirkegaard if you need out of the nihilistic brainlet trap.

not really, it really sounds sophomoric in places, the sort of book that you read and you start understanding that the author really doesn't have any novel ideas, he just wants you to think he's got it all figured out and follow him down into the rabbit hole of ahedonia. His nihilism isn't really adolescent like most of the people you see espousing ideas like this but it's not particularly well argued in this book either. He just kind of tries to wear you down with fancy words and sophistries and hope that the ideas resonate enough with you that you get pulled along by it. Read Cioran if you want a more well developed take on a similar world view.

>taking the author's words at face value
yeah sure he totally doesn't want people to listen to him, that's why he published his thoughts in a commercially available book.

Anyone with a basic science education knows this, the Stoic philosophers said the same. Epicteus is my fav. The Chinese summmed it up in “Life is a search for truth but there is no truth” .

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It's a great introduction to anti-natalist/pessimistic philosophy. Ligotti clearly knows his shit. However, if you aren't interested in that sorta stuff, it'll probably rub you the wrong way. Ligotti can be a bit arrogant at times, although he's self-aware and has a sense of humor. His prose style is very flowery so be prepared to crack open a dictionary or thesaurus. I like Ligotti's prose style, but it's definitely not for everyone.

what do you mean by this?

this is a pussy talking

the best outcome is to read the book, understand exactly what it says, and go on with your life, comfortable in the fact that everything was and will always continue to be absolutely pointless

they're different. Borges is not as pessimistic as the ligs

just read both, it will take you under a week

Why are people even directly comparing Borges to ligotti ? What is this retarded shit ?

I don't get it either. Ligotti is a fan of Borges, but Ligotti's biggest influences are Lovecraft, Poe, Kafka, and Schulz. You can make comparisons between Ligotti and Borges, but it's completely ridiculous to accuse Ligotti's work of being Borges fanfiction.

Read both. They have their own unique styles. Borges' wrote fantasy that has a sense of wonder, whereas Ligotti writes horror that's pure gloom and doom. They come from completely different philosophical perspectives and they aim for different goals. Borges wants to fill you with awe, Ligotti wants to fill you with dread. If you prefer fantasy, go for Borges. If you prefer horror, go for Ligotti.

>Observations of the world depend on the observer.
this is the most retarded thing i've ever read on instagram