Владислав Педдер – Processual Pessimism. On the Nature of Cosmic Suffering and Human Nothingness (страница 3)

Now about contemporary popular psychology and its promises of “emotion regulation.” Cognitive-behavioral therapy claims that changing thought patterns will change emotional states. This presupposes that we control our thoughts. But do we control them or merely pretend to? Thoughts arise spontaneously; we do not choose them – we observe them appearing in the stream of consciousness. Mindfulness techniques teach observing thoughts without attachment, but who is this observer?

Lisa Feldman Barrett showed that emotions are conceptual constructions the brain creates to interpret bodily sensations. We do not “feel fear” as an objective state – we construct the concept of fear from a set of interoceptive signals plus context plus cultural presets. This means that the attempt to “manage emotions” is an attempt to manage one’s own interpretations, which are generated at a pre-reflective level faster than we can become aware of them.

Consider the feature film Equilibrium. In this dystopia society achieves “liberation from emotions” through the drug prozium. The result is a zombified existence devoid of depth, meaning, and what makes life life – emotions. The film criticizes this utopia of rationality but misses a deeper truth: even if we could eliminate emotions, we would not solve the problem of suffering. Eliot’s case shows that life stripped of emotional coloration does not become “purer” or “more rational” – it becomes dysfunctional and destructive. Emotions constitute the foundation of the mind’s functioning rather than impede it.

That is precisely why Liminal acceptance, which I described in the first part of the book, cannot operate as a “solution.” When I speak of accepting epistemic absurdity, of humble merging with reality, of accepting fate and death – these are not techniques to be practiced in order to attain inner calm. They describe the moment when all techniques collapse, when it becomes obvious that there is no exit. Liminal acceptance is not a solution; it is the fixation of the problem in its pure form. One must understand that once Pandora’s box has been opened in the form of the awareness of all the horrors of existence, it can never be closed. For me, as for many, Ligotti was that box: no one showed the immediate reality of our world and our position in it better than he did, without metaphysical refinements, without Schopenhauer’s or Mainländer’s “Will,” a reality plain and comprehensible as it is, albeit often through the lens of the horror-fiction genre. Nothing will fill that void that has always been within you but has suddenly been discovered. Exposure therapy5 is effective. You can learn to think about death without panic attacks. Accepting death is relatively easy, and one should not forget about it; for some it is fear, for others even the worst thing they have ever faced in life. But emptiness and meaninglessness are something different. This is not fear of an event, but the awareness of the absence of any ground. And this emptiness is not filled. Whatever you try to fill it with – meanings, projects, attachments, achievements – it always returns, because it was never an empty space requiring completion. This is reality.

That is precisely why, in the second part of the book, Professor P. criticizes the concept of Liminal acceptance, showing that it remains within the framework of the illusion of a subject who “accepts.” But if the subject is only a temporary model generated by the brain, then who is it that accepts? Acceptance presupposes an agent; there is no separate subject that could accept anything. There exists only a continuous process in which temporary states arise and disappear. Any “strategy of acceptance” turns out to be a fiction: changes simply occur according to deterministic laws, and there is no independent center that chooses or rejects these changes.

My critique, for the sake of which this division of roles into two professors was conceived, is not directed against the practices themselves as such, but against their being sold as ontological salvation. There is a critical distinction between a method of temporary calming and a claim to solve the fundamental problem of existence. But what if we admit honestly: life is meaningless, death is inevitable, and between these two points there is nothing that would require heroic effort? If we accept this not as a premise for further “spiritual growth,” but as a final conclusion, then the logical consequence becomes the minimization of intervention. Fuss loses any meaning. Why accumulate wealth if it only concentrates suffering through exploitation? Why accumulate knowledge if it only multiplies the awareness of meaninglessness?

There exist traditions that approached this understanding without elevating it into a metaphysical system of salvation, but I will not list them here – you can easily identify them yourself. They described a way of existing with minimal resistance to processes that will in any case unfold independently of our efforts. The difference lies in the fact that they did not promise nirvana, did not promise inner peace or transformation of consciousness. If you have already understood that struggle is meaningless, then why continue to struggle?

This is not the heroic asceticism of the Buddhist type, demanding renunciation for the sake of a higher goal. It is a simple recognition that active participation in economic, social, and emotional cycles requires energy that is spent on maintaining illusions. To consume only as much as is necessary for the functioning of the biological machine. To produce only as much as is required for this minimal consumption. When an action is necessary, to perform it with sufficient strength to achieve the immediate result, without excess, without an attempt to control consequences that lie beyond the limits of direct influence. The attempt to foresee and control distant consequences is a form of megalomania, the assumption that we are capable of calculating infinitely complex chains of cause and effect. The Stoic tries to control his reactions, the Buddhist tries to control his desires, the modern person tries to control career, relationships, the future. All these attempts arise from the assumption that control is possible and desirable. But if life is meaningless and will end in death regardless of our efforts, then it is more honest to admit that we do not know what will happen and therefore must limit ourselves to minimally necessary intervention. Even death is another form of active relation, requiring emotional investment. It will come in its own time, determined by the combination of biological processes and random factors. All that remains is to allow the process to proceed on its own.

It is important to understand: this mode of existence is not virtuous in the Stoic sense. Virtue presupposes a moral dimension in which actions possess intrinsic value. Moral categories have lost a universal foundation, and nevertheless a selective, contextual ethics of harm-minimization remains possible – this is already a pragmatic ethical stance, not a metaphysical truth. This is not a path to liberation in the Buddhist sense – because there is nothing to be liberated from and no one to be liberated. This is not a technique of emotion regulation in the psychotherapeutic sense – because regulation presupposes a goal, and there are no goals. It is simply a way to pass the time between birth and death that minimizes one’s own contribution to the total suffering not through heroic self-sacrifice, but through the simple recognition that any active intervention in the world is more likely to multiply suffering than to reduce it.

This is not proposed as a model for imitation; you are free to do whatever you wish until you encounter external resistance. There is no claim that this is “right” or “better.” Most people will continue to create projects, build careers, start families, participate in economic cycles, believe in the possibility of improvement. That is their path. To be convinced of the contrary would be just another form of active intervention, an attempt to impose one’s own vision. But for those who have arrived at certain conclusions about the nature of reality and see no grounds for fuss, there is the possibility simply to stop fussing.

The difference between this view and the “liberating” ontological practices is fundamental. The latter present themselves as solutions, as paths toward something better – toward inner peace, toward “liberation.” If life is meaningless and will end in death (and nothing else is given), then heroic efforts to fill it with meaning are merely another form of self-deception, requiring constant energetic expenditure to maintain yet another cognitive distortion.

I hope this clarification puts everything in its place. Thus the position presented in the book is neither existentialism nor nihilism in the conventional sense. It is a consistent pessimism that rejects not only consolatory meanings, but even the very possibility of finding consolation in any action, practice, or “acceptance.” All known philosophies of acceptance, humility, or emotion management are only more refined forms of self-deception, ephemeral constructions. The second part, written in the voice of Professor P., destroys even this final illusion, showing that experience itself is primary in relation to all these constructions of the mind, and that there is no exit. In the third part, The Experience of the Tragic, written in my own voice, I once again clarified all these points so that no doubts would remain about what was said. Nothing is more real than pessimism – not because pessimism is “realism,” but because it alone refuses consolatory illusions and self-deception. It does not deceive you – and if it does deceive you, it will certainly not harm you, for what can harm a human being more than life itself? It simply reveals reality as it is – and this reality does not require our acceptance, because it exists regardless of whether we accept it or not, whether we hide or consciously drag our existence to the final day. The best thing a human being can do in life is to do nothing. Having dealt with this question, we may begin our path.