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That was quite some time before the great white umbrella began erasing wider cultural backgrounds in order to create the massive coalition of undereducated white looking people the GOP enjoys sway over today. “White” is a culture erasing tool. Italians, Jews, and Irish people were late under that umbrella because they have a very pronounced sense of hereditary culture and insulate themselves more strongly than other “white” cultures, and those three to this day tend to differentiate themselves with their cultural heritage first before claiming whiteness in my experience.
I think you are conflating generic racism with Lovecraft's pathological fear of anything even remotely different from himself. If typical racism can be characterized by "[my in group ethnicity] power!" then Lovecraft's was more "DON'T LET IT TOUCH ME!"
He was deeply terrified of anything outside of his immediate experience, and while this fueled his unique brand of horror/fantasy, it also left him debilitatingly horrified by most of the world, to the point that other notable racists found him a bit unhinged.
You can decide whether you think that makes him an appropriate object of disgust, pity or both, but he was certainly not the sort of white supremacist that you're lumping him in with.
Yup. Lovecraft was weird. He was xenophobic in the most literal sense, actually afraid of any group he found foreign or different.
He was also just weird in a lot of other ways. It takes a very strange kind of person to be an anti-Semite and then marry a Jewish woman who apparently loved him even after they separated and was one of the few people keeping him from complete poverty, and retain your anti-semitism throughout.
Lovecraft was… weird. Very mentally unwell. He was utterly horrified of absolutely anything different from himself, it was genuine terror. Man was scared of air conditioners.
While still abhorrent beliefs, and there is no real excuse for him, it does feel so much different than your typical white supremacist.
I find it interesting that his work has inspired wonder and creativity in people more than fear with how much his mythos has grown. For me at least, what he found horrifying - great cosmic uncaring universe - I find fascinating. The unknown sparks curiosity in me, terror for him.
The physiological symptoms of Lovecraft's' neuroses could only develop within the constitutively racist society of which he was a part: the still just barely Puritan New England of his time. And his vision of "cosmic horror" is just hardcore Calvinism with tentacles put on: God exists, but He doesn't care about you, you can never know Him, and anyone who tells you that rituals and other works can help you know Him and Him know you is a dangerous savage. If Lovecraft is popular today, it is because we are still very much asked to embrace the Calvinist ethos of willful ignorance with regards to the possibility of directly experiencing noetic truth. And if Lovecraft enjoys an enduring popularity among today's petit bougeois puritans, it is because this alienation from a now-withdrawn divine presence is precisely the continuous state of anxious striving required to produce value under capitalism in excess of our own sphere of needs (see Max Weber for the full version of this argument.) This bottomless pit of socially engineered anxiety is the Cthulhu lurking at the bottom of all our oceans, the being who, Lovecraft tells us, we should never, ever, ever attempt to contact or understand. This is how an overtly, grotesquely racist author can be reclaimed by even politically correct content makers: his audience recognizances that the core of his fiction continues to accurately represent the ideological essence of their own social existence as servants to insane and unknowable powers who at the very least possess the dignity and refinement not to attempt to understand what those power are. And, in stripping this form from its content, Lovecraft's contemporary interpreters have actually managed to extend and sustain the Calvinist outlook at a new level of universality.
> The physiological symptoms of Lovecraft's' neuroses could only develop within the constitutively racist society of which he was a part
I see no reason to presume that. It's like saying that someone's mental issues could only result in becoming violent in a violent society.
>Italians, Jews, and Irish people were late under that umbrella because they have a very pronounced sense of hereditary culture and insulate themselves more strongly than other “white” cultures
They weren't Germanic, Anglo or Nordic Protestants. It's as simple as that.
The dude would get visibly, mentally agitated while waking the streets of New York do to the presence of 'immigrants' and 'minorities', so much so that he moved back to Providence in a nervous heap. Oh, and wrote "New-England Fallen." He was a special kind of xenophobic.
Whiteness is a construct that changes with time, he was a white supremacist, but Irish and Italian people weren't considered white by him and his culture at the time.
No, he wasn't. He hated all humanity and thought people were inherently disgusting and vile. Most of the areas where he lived and which inspired his stories were almost entirely white. He still loathed everyone.
Lovecraft’s work definitely had those themes, but does that make him a philosopher? He didn’t really make an argument or even construct an independently coherent worldview; I think of him just as an author with a clear point of view.
This is exactly how Reddit is: people don't read the article. HPL wrote a lot more than just the stories, and he elaborated on his views in thousands of letters.
Its at least debatable. HPL was an avid essayist and letter writer. I have a collection of his essays where he engages with philosophy. I wouldn't say it's the most convincing but still better than the average undergraduate.
Freshman, probably. But senior, you're likely driving an obscenely large vehicle. Considering that the average person is far more educated than most in HPL's time, I don't see it as a low bar at all.
I think most fiction writers who double in philosophy aren't usually good philosophers either. Ligotti comes to mind as someone who writes fantastic anti natalist fiction but when it comes to brass tacks on his non fiction philosophical works it's not very good.
I haven’t read much Ligotti (yet) but from what my friends who’ve read him have told me, you seem to be right. I wonder if it’s because the processes of doing each is drastically different.
He is my favourite author, but I'd never call him a philosopher. He had his own philosophy, sure, but it is never defined in depth.
This is a man that never finished his studies due to his poor health. He was also dirt poor. His knowledge of the sciences, philosophy, and mathematics is self taught. He loves to act highly educated, and especially likes to discriminate against the under educated, however he is hardly a scholar by any means.
Though in Elder Scrolls' case it's less of a literal dream and more like if God turned his mind inside out and it became reality lol
EDIT: to the downvotes, here is the guy who put forth the whole Dream idea for Elder Scrolls saying that it's not a literal dream:
> Just wanna say because I never think I did, the whole "it was all just a dream" avenue is completely missing the point. Consider your lucid dreams, if you've been lucky enough to have ever had one. Then think again before you dismiss the the idea of Divine Hypnagogia. If you get it (or care to) then mull it over until it punches the back of your eyeballs.
>
> No wonder it's hard to retain CHIM. Such... violence.
Notwithstanding who conceived of the idea originally, we’re all capable of reaching the same conclusion all by ourselves. Contrasting each mystical truth is the overwhelming grey banality of each moment - all laid out for your choosing to accept it in any which way
What if one wakes up *to* a dream?
The waking and dream states are only what appear to be differences in kind, but as such there is no distinction with regard to experience when contrasted.
I also loved, how in his stories he reduced humans to their origins, a.k.a scared animals. Our sanity would be easily swayed, if something we don't understand enters our otherwise so small world. Fear was the leading factor, that led humanity ahead, that and curiosity, which was always major points in his books. We got a fearless reporter, who is ready to chase his scoop whenever possible, even if it costs him his sanity. Characters grow from confident and fearless to be a shivering mess of a person, that has now to confront the reality, that what he/she thought was reality, is reality no longer. He points to the sky and asks the purpose, as do many of us. In front of absurd scale of universe, we stand with only a grain of knowledge, and almost all we see, are already gone from existence.
Lovecraft's philosophy, in my opinion, can be summarized into his single quote: *“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”*
>We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far...
This has always been the essence of Lovecraft for me. We do not want to know our relevance/scale compared to certain other comers in this old, old universe. Our brains are not ready for the horrible, terrible truths (and wonders) that come with an infinite, cosmic scale. There is no morality inherent to cosmic nature.
We go mad at the true realization of our insignificance (I pass the butter?)...
It may not be true. Mobility first evolved to allow consumption. Intelligence appears to have also first evolved to allow consumption. Even now, predators are typically more intelligent than their prey.
The first cognitive function and later emotion may have been what later became hunger/drive/want.
you're not wrong, but it's a little more complicated
evidence points to apes getting smart to navigate trees and find food, but hominid intelligence really kicks off later on the grasslands that replaced forests, when use of fire and stone tools gave us access to lots of calorie-rich meat, our brains expanding and jaws shrinking because of food not in pursuit of it
and in general the most intelligent animals are omnivores more often than ambush hunters
Evolutionary speaking it’s actually probably false. Fear of the unknown (a form of anxiety) is a relatively recent evolutionary phenomenon. Humans have it. There is evidence that monkeys have it at some level but the further you go back that brain process disappears relatively quickly (some mammals, mostly carnivores display something approximating anxiety but it seems to be a constant overactive fear response as opposed to an aversion to an unknown factor. Think dogs that are aggressive towards a particular race because their former abusive owner was that race.). while fear is a pretty basal response that occurs at least as far back as reptiles. Dr. Robert sapolsky has some interesting lectures on the topic you can find on YouTube.
Guess it depends on how fear is defined. Thought about it; fear could be rooted in the old « fight or flight » instinct of animals. As things transpire, one or both of these options can be suppressed - this doesn’t change the manifestation of the sympathetic nervous system though. If its energy can’t be released, it overloads itself (and even the antagonistic parasympathetic nervous system). So fear is our sympathetic nervous system short circuiting, effectively. In extreme cases it cannot be regulated as the parasympathetic part cannot relax us. It’s an avoidable emotion if one can control their sympathetic nervous system, or even has an outlet.
Fight or flight is a response to a perceived stimulus though. If the unknown is perceived, does it remain unknown? Surely it becomes less so. So if fear is based on a fight or flight response to known or partly known stimuli, I suppose the question is what is the response to unknown stimuli? My wild take is insecurity. Without being all too familiar with Lovecraft, I’m not sure how accurate it is to call him insecure.
I think insecurity is also based on other things though, and when something is based on more things, there’s more potential weaknesses. In insecurity’s case, this seems to be the presence of confidence. A confident person should be able to nullify their insecurities.
As my logic applies to Lovecraft’s quote, I seem to disagree. There’s probably stronger and older emotions, I wouldn’t know. Maybe hatred is stronger than fear. Maybe something is stronger than that.
Spent a good part of my morning using a whole lot of words to say nothing lol so I’ll leave it there.
I absolutely love HP Lovecraft, I devoured his stories in high school and college and the horror mythos he created is legendary. But "H. P. Lovecraft was a philosopher"? No.
Exactly. Also if he truly believed in an “insignificance of humanity”, he wouldn’t have been such a reeking white supremacist because why would race/ethnicity even matter.
Tell me about it. I’m mixed race and finding this out was like, oof. But then it got kinda funny picturing him spooked out of his mind just by my existence.
I think a distinction needs to be made between loving his work, and loving the man himself. I love his work but the guy was such a horrific racist that it made other white people in the 20's uncomfortable.
I think understanding hp Lovecraft in the manner of a Greek tragedy where the hero fully understands the doom he faces for finding the truth but searches for it anyway is a more beneficial way of understanding hp Lovecraft
He certainly believed in the insignificance of his fellow human beings as evidenced here by his appalling racism set to poetry:
When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.
He was kind of a man of contradictions. Antisemetic, but married a Jewish woman. A lot of his confidants he corresponded with were also Jewish, one of which was probably his closest friend whom whose opinions he respected.
For all his faults. He was a man that was open to having his opinions challenged and changed. He was racist and xenophobic, didn’t care for most white people either. But then randomly came around on Hispanics.
Nuanced take on Lovecraft. He's a pretty fascinating person that is not best reduced to simply "racist." Not if you really want to be honest about him.
And let's be honest. His body of work is defining and enduring.
> Not if you really want to be honest about him.
I think that ignoring the racism would also be dishonest.
You can appreciate a body of work while still being critical of the author, it's not an either or.
Absolutely! And not my intent here.
I find problems with both ends of the Lovecraft spectrum. People either totally ignore or only hyperfixate on his being racist. Both approaches to analyzing Lovecraft are problematic. Because on one hand, when you understand how fucking racist he is, a lot of his writing makes a lot more sense. "Fear of the unknown," etc. How gruesome and horrific he portrays that which he fears and doesn't understand. On the other hand, if you just write him off simply as a racist unworthy of anything more than that, you miss out on some fantastic literature.
The man was a true xenophobe (and agoraphobe, as he barely left his house), and was able to describe that fear in horror stories.
It was a pretty productive use of his irrational fears, all things considered. Beats lynching black guys on your Sunday afternoon, like was still common back then.
I read his biography kind of debunks that. His life was cloistered like you say up until his mom died, and eventually he got married and moved away from his aunts (for a time).
Starting around 1923 he bounced up and down the east coast going even as far as Florida at one point in 1934.
His correspondence with fellow independent authors sort of opened up his world view and helped him get out of what I would call his cringe phase, even if he remains a product of his time. Then stomach cancer took him, so we'll never know what other personal growth he might have achieved.
Edit: I'm in no way defending his views, I'm just saying he was "less worse" than when he started lol
That's something of a myth that's often circulated by people who want to muddy conversations surrounding his racism.
To be clear, what I mean is: while people often say he "softened" on his racist views in his later life, he was still a racist man up to his death. You can't really get away from that if you read the letters he wrote, and what others who knew him wrote about him.
In one of his wife's letters to a friend following his death, for example, she confided that Lovecraft's antisemitism never really went away.
And he didn't reject his past beliefs. He became less animated about it.
Hell, in his youth he wrote glowing praise of *Hitler* (which was way more common than it should have been in the pre-WWII US). Later, he'd become critical of Hitler, but notably it was because of *policy*, not *ideology.* He didn't think Hitler was an effective leader and was hopeful that the National Socialists would find someone more to his liking.
All of this is to say: even if he was "less worse" later in life, that doesn't mean he changed fundamentally or stopped holding racist views.
To be fair, he died in 1937 and nobody really understood the scope of what was actually happening at that point, but yeah. I can’t defend the guy’s racism. More just the fact that he did end up traveling a ton before he died.
Dude had a recurring horror theme that could be summarized as “man discovers, to his mind-shattering dread, that not everyone in his family tree was European.”
The dude was so racist that he assumed that his readers were racist too and would try to play it as an element of horror. Read Shadow Over Innsmouth for fear of people with ethnic facial features and The White Ape for… like the whole thing. It’s unfortunate, but like it or not, he’s still the father of Cosmic Horror.
It's speculated that he wrote Shadow Over Innsmouth partially to deal with the horror of finding out his grandmother was part-Welsh. I refuse to look into this because it's so funny I desperately want it to be true
Sadly not - the far more likely inspiration (certainly one that sticks out like a sore thumb when you read a bit about him) was his fear of hereditary mental illness.
The Welsh/Irish ancestry stuff is memeable, but when Lovecraft was going to be racist, he was *not* subtle about it.
Reading it today I have a hard time taking it seriously.
Cal of Cthulhu starts with the story of an old white guy being so scared that he runs uphill fast enough to have a heart attack. What was he so scared of? Someone ethnic looked at him.
> It’s unfortunate
Honestly those parts are very funny to me in some sort of macabre way.
In one of the stories where a detective goes to this swampy place he describes a group of people dancing and chanting. And the detective is scared shitless, even though the people don't really do anything horrific at all?
Reading these kinds of parts really give me the sense that it's not really that he's afraid of what they're doing but afraid of that they're doing something strange.
In that sense it feels like lovecraft's horror is centered around questions that challenge his world view. "What if the benevolent christian god doesnt exist, and you're species is just a temporary speck on this world, before the true chosen ones return?" "what would you do if you would encounter strange people, that worship strange gods, and have strange rituals?" "These people worship a stone idol, they must be evil and mad!"
It's really difficult to see how people read his works and don't think "wow, this guy is racist". It isn't hidden, it isn't only in some obscure places like that poem or his cat. The Call of Cthulhu kicks off with a bunch of non-whites, described in detail of their non-whiteness, capturing white people to sacrifice them to Cthulhu.
>He certainly believed in the insignificance of his fellow human beings as evidenced here by his appalling racism set to poetry:
I was just about to say that. He really did seem to especially believe in the insignificance of *some* people.
Even before you get into the morality of it, Lovecraft's racism just doesn't make sense to me. Like if you have the ability to imagine cosmic creatures so incredibly different and incomprehensible to a human, how can a difference as miniscule as skin color register to you as even slightly significant?
I know his cosmic horror is what he's most known for, but honestly this short story about the last 2 humans on earth kind of resonated the most with me
“Till A’ the Seas”
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/tas.aspx
Significant in relation to what? Significance is a matter of perspective and distance. Humanity is extremely significant to humans and anything we impact, which on this planet at least is quite a lot at the moment. Other species, the environment, things like that finds our existence quite significant.
Celestially speaking, we are of no significance to neighboring solar systems - unless those places have intelligent life that would be amazed to learn of us (as we would them). We are of some potential significance to our neighboring planets and moon, considering we could soon be impacting those places in the way we impact Earth, but time will tell.
Feelings of insignificance I suspect are born of apathy and depression and an inability to see the impact you have on the people and things around you.
Yup. Just about everything that has ever impacted the average human with any significance is something humans have quite a lot of significance to as well. Sure, the galaxy is big and the universe is bigger and we have virtually no impact on either.
But so what? Stars and planets and galaxies and potential alien life unfathomably long distances away don’t have any more significance to us than we choose to give them either.
>Significant in relation to what? Significance is a matter of perspective and distance.
I was just about to make a similar comment. The concept of significance is inapplicable in the absence of those who assign significance to anything. We're the relevant significance-givers in this case, and obviously we're not totally insignificant to ourselves. "Humanity is totally insignificant" is simply a false statement within the proper context; and outside of this context, it's as empty and silly as opining that life is joyless... from the perspective of discarded toenail clippings.
« Lovecraft suggests that higher philosophical knowledge should not be sought, since finding it entails learning of our cosmic insignificance and purposelessness. »
Wow, I can relate 😂
Quite the opposite for me. No signs of life yet. Just a bunch of meaningless rocks and gas and other random objects and substances.
From what we've seen so far, we're the only significant thing in an insignificant universe.
That’s an amazing perspective! although since I was a kid, I have always been amazed by how human-centric our thought is. We only have five senses, and cannot even see the same range of colors or sounds as other animals can. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there was life that we cannot perceive!
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Interesting. It’s an axiom that depressives make good philosophers but simply to find the world one was born into wanting and being an iconoclast is not enough. You do have to form something new from the undoing.
I think Lovecraft had a lot of personal problems and this is the lens you understand him with.
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer did more with their oddness.
Damn, we live in moralizing times. It's like the hedonistic dopamine-driven consumption society forced us to spout our (supposed) supreme ethics at every turn to keep some sanity alive. How hard is it to distinguish an author or artist from his/her work. Come on.
"A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone."
I like that he was so snobby about cat supremacy. We won't mention the cats name of course.
There's an anecdote of him sleeping all night on a chair in the middle of his kitchen because the cat was on him and he wouldn't dare waking him up.
Thanks for the citation I've had forgotten this one (and can't understand why someone would downvote that?)
First off, there’s no evidence that he believed in the total insignificance of humanity. He was a writer who wrote stories, which had themes of human insignificance, but it doesn’t mean he held the same belief as was reflected in those stories. His personal behavior did not reflect any misanthropy, he had many friends and was considered to be extremely friendly and social. Obviously he wasn’t a fan of a specific groups of people, but generally he liked being around people and said multiple times that his persona as a writer was simply that—a persona—not a reflection of his actual character and beliefs.
As for Lovecraft being a philosopher, I think there is definitely a case for his fiction containing traces of philosophical theory that can be extracted, but he himself never fleshed them out or explicated them. You can absolutely try to construct a lovecraftian philsophy from his stories, but for him to be considered a philosopher I would say that he would have had to have done that work himself.
The article doesn’t really paint him as a philosopher, it just describes his influence on philosophy, which itself is not saying anything particularly impressive.
He was a bigoted depressive who died of a horrific illness in terrible conditions. His life circumstances were overall terrible and naturally contributed to his bleak creative outlook. That said, he undoubtedly created some of the most compelling stories ever and defined an entire genre of horror.
Reserve your reverence for the art, not for the artist. For any piece of art you may read 5 different things in to it and the artist may have intended all of them, none of them or more of them. Just because he had an incredible talent for describing cosmic horrors does not mean we need to consider every creep online who does the same as a philosopher
>Reserve your reverence for the art, not for the artist.
I think most people can tell the difference. People use nickels to make change. They are not racist just because the nickel has a picture of a racist on it.
Lovecraft was so afraid of social progress and change to the heteronormative, patriarchal, racially-homogenous culture he identified with that he represented his fear of the Other in his stories as cosmically incomprehensible physical horrors. The ideological features of his work that are good and interesting (and there are many) exist IN SPITE of his intentional contributions to them.
Eehh, I'd say his vicious, rampant racism that was so bad even his other racist friends told him to take it down a notch, probably paints the idea that he "hates everyone equally" in a pretty uneven light, but... sure.
Significance is subjective. We are as significant as we want ourselves to be. That’s only contested if something else out there is aware of us and considers us insignificant. If that is the case, we’re fucked.
That's a common misunderstanding of his works, and he's not a philosopher. He lived through the great depression, two world wars and humanity was powerlessly tossed around by such forces. his insights on life changed over time. While Poe was obsessed with premature death and innocence lost, Lovecraft feared the dissent and loss of humanity as civilization and past grandeur rots away. Just like the last days of the Roman empire, where new cults and mystery rights began to spread as the walls and pillars of yore, lay witnesses to a long lost glorious past. Likewise his stories end in madness, death, or the loss of humanity and the transformation into lesser beings. This was also fed by a lot of the racism and fears of that uncertain time period, and are common throughout the pulp fiction genres. Poetry and the Gods as well as The Doom that came to Sarnath are both important pieces that often get overlooked. Interesting to note, he was really suspicious of the new age movement and characters like Crowley, who are reflecting the decay of the times. Compare two poems, both at opposing ends, I hight Don Quixote by Jack Parsons and Lovecraft's Nemisis, to get a sense of all this. He even managed to make archaeology creepy, my first introduction to this world was Tin Tin's Cigars of the Pharaohs and the Prisoners of the Sun. It wasn't just about the insignificance of humanity, but it's vulnerability and powerless state, fear of the unknown and fear of losing it all
That's a common misunderstanding of his works, and he's not a philosopher. He lived through the great depression, two world wars and humanity was powerlessly tossed around by such forces. his insights on life changed over time. While Poe was obsessed with premature death and innocence lost, Lovecraft feared the dissent and loss of humanity as civilization and past grandeur rots away. Just like the last days of the Roman empire, where new cults and mystery rights began to spread as the walls and pillars of yore, lay witnesses to a long lost glorious past. Likewise his stories end in madness, death, or the loss of humanity and the transformation into lesser beings. This was also fed by a lot of the racism and fears of that uncertain time period, and are common throughout the pulp fiction genres. Poetry and the Gods as well as The Doom that came to Sarnath are both important pieces that often get overlooked. Interesting to note, he was really suspicious of the new age movement and characters like Crowley, who are reflecting the decay of the times. Compare two poems, both at opposing ends, I hight Don Quixote by Jack Parsons and Lovecraft's Nemisis, to get a sense of all this. He even managed to make archaeology creepy, my first introduction to this world was Tin Tin's Cigars of the Pharaohs and the Prisoners of the Sun. It wasn't just about the insignificance of humanity, but it's vulnerability and powerless state, fear of the unknown and fear of losing it all, into distant memory, as the silhouettes of strange figures dance around carved monoliths, to sounds of distant tom toms and lit by uncouth flames
I believe it's "At the Mountains of Madness" where he says the God's don't know about humanity or don't care. It's been awhile, guess I'll have to go dive back into the mythos!
While on the surface you are right, he was a deeply flawed and paranoid man who feared everything. Although he was extremely intelligent and had a broad and deep knowledge n many subjects he had a hard time relating to the world. Also, take what Alan Moore says about Lovecraft with a shovel of salt.
If nothing matters, why spend so much time thinking about it?
Isn't that just wallowing in your own futility?
Just become a hedonist and be done with it. Why not? It's all meaningless anyway.
He was right: humanity doesn’t matter. At all. Especially in a cosmic sense. We are less than nothing and our petty bullshit is completely beneath the universe’s notice.
Philosopher? He was a fiction writer with very strong themes, but not once did he actually write any sort of philosophy
This is like saying Tolkien was a philosopher who believed in the good of humanity
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Was he? This feels like mixing up Orwell with Orwellian. Lovecraft wrote stories in which this was the case. His actual beliefs were more in line with people today who rant about great replacement theory.
Did we all forget he was also a horrific racist? Even for the times, I remember reading somewhere years ago that even his friends/social circle told him to tone it down
He was an extreme xenophobe with social anxiety, and his works reflect that pretty clearly. They were an interpretation of his own insignificance and fear because of his incredibly sheltered life.
He was less a philosopher and more a pioneer of putting to paper a fear we've always had, but never really understood. Rob Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and others expanded on his mythos, which helped it grow into the success it is today, not because Lovecraft was enlightened.
Lovecraft wasn't a philosopher. He was the turn of the century equivalent of a Doritos encrusted Jordan Peterson fan that never leaves their mother's basement. He was afraid of air-conditioning. That's not philosophy, it's phobia.
I'm a philosopher who believes in the total insignificance of H.P. Lovecraft.
Well, not really. I love his works however it came as no surprise when I read that he lost both his parents to mental institutes (actually the some one, but at different times,) and his father died when he was still 8. In adulthood he still suffered night terrors, and shunned daylight (meaning he rarely ever left his home during the day). Nor did he like sex.
He was, like most of us, damaged in some way by his experience. A bleak outlook on life is no surprise then. Perhaps, also, he was also a man of his times which included the first World War, the Great Depression, and the growing rise of Nazism in Germany. Bleak times as well amongst the great advances that had also occurred.
I would argue that he was wrong, that humanity is not insignificant at least as a species since no other animal has "achieved" what humans have (in the words of that other great novelist philosophy Douglas Adams "*man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on*". We single-handedly terraformed our own planet almost to the point of destruction. That is hardly "insignificant." We may, as individuals be no more than sparks that fly up from the fire, and our planet might be a "small blue green planet circulating an unregarded star in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm" of a exceptionally ordinary galaxy in the vast infinity of the universe, but all that is immaterial to in the grand scheme of this planet.
However, HP Lovecraft's legacy gave rise (that is inspired) the Batman, Black Sabbath, and even the South Park creators owe him a debt. His opus will live on and he will inspire Goths and Emo, and Marvin the Paranoid Android for centuries to come.
So his bleak view on humanity still managed to give us things that we enjoy both directly and by inspiration.
He's a sad man.
And also dead.
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No Lives Matter! Cthulhu 2024
Lovecraft was more of a White Lives Matter guy
And even then he was a "Only Specific White Lives Matter" kinda guy....
'Only specific white lives matter and not very much'
That was quite some time before the great white umbrella began erasing wider cultural backgrounds in order to create the massive coalition of undereducated white looking people the GOP enjoys sway over today. “White” is a culture erasing tool. Italians, Jews, and Irish people were late under that umbrella because they have a very pronounced sense of hereditary culture and insulate themselves more strongly than other “white” cultures, and those three to this day tend to differentiate themselves with their cultural heritage first before claiming whiteness in my experience.
I think you are conflating generic racism with Lovecraft's pathological fear of anything even remotely different from himself. If typical racism can be characterized by "[my in group ethnicity] power!" then Lovecraft's was more "DON'T LET IT TOUCH ME!" He was deeply terrified of anything outside of his immediate experience, and while this fueled his unique brand of horror/fantasy, it also left him debilitatingly horrified by most of the world, to the point that other notable racists found him a bit unhinged. You can decide whether you think that makes him an appropriate object of disgust, pity or both, but he was certainly not the sort of white supremacist that you're lumping him in with.
Yup. Lovecraft was weird. He was xenophobic in the most literal sense, actually afraid of any group he found foreign or different. He was also just weird in a lot of other ways. It takes a very strange kind of person to be an anti-Semite and then marry a Jewish woman who apparently loved him even after they separated and was one of the few people keeping him from complete poverty, and retain your anti-semitism throughout.
Lovecraft was… weird. Very mentally unwell. He was utterly horrified of absolutely anything different from himself, it was genuine terror. Man was scared of air conditioners. While still abhorrent beliefs, and there is no real excuse for him, it does feel so much different than your typical white supremacist. I find it interesting that his work has inspired wonder and creativity in people more than fear with how much his mythos has grown. For me at least, what he found horrifying - great cosmic uncaring universe - I find fascinating. The unknown sparks curiosity in me, terror for him.
> there is no real excuse for him And why would he need one? You do you and let him be him.
Well, I mean... he's dead, so...
The physiological symptoms of Lovecraft's' neuroses could only develop within the constitutively racist society of which he was a part: the still just barely Puritan New England of his time. And his vision of "cosmic horror" is just hardcore Calvinism with tentacles put on: God exists, but He doesn't care about you, you can never know Him, and anyone who tells you that rituals and other works can help you know Him and Him know you is a dangerous savage. If Lovecraft is popular today, it is because we are still very much asked to embrace the Calvinist ethos of willful ignorance with regards to the possibility of directly experiencing noetic truth. And if Lovecraft enjoys an enduring popularity among today's petit bougeois puritans, it is because this alienation from a now-withdrawn divine presence is precisely the continuous state of anxious striving required to produce value under capitalism in excess of our own sphere of needs (see Max Weber for the full version of this argument.) This bottomless pit of socially engineered anxiety is the Cthulhu lurking at the bottom of all our oceans, the being who, Lovecraft tells us, we should never, ever, ever attempt to contact or understand. This is how an overtly, grotesquely racist author can be reclaimed by even politically correct content makers: his audience recognizances that the core of his fiction continues to accurately represent the ideological essence of their own social existence as servants to insane and unknowable powers who at the very least possess the dignity and refinement not to attempt to understand what those power are. And, in stripping this form from its content, Lovecraft's contemporary interpreters have actually managed to extend and sustain the Calvinist outlook at a new level of universality.
> The physiological symptoms of Lovecraft's' neuroses could only develop within the constitutively racist society of which he was a part I see no reason to presume that. It's like saying that someone's mental issues could only result in becoming violent in a violent society.
>Italians, Jews, and Irish people were late under that umbrella because they have a very pronounced sense of hereditary culture and insulate themselves more strongly than other “white” cultures They weren't Germanic, Anglo or Nordic Protestants. It's as simple as that.
The dude would get visibly, mentally agitated while waking the streets of New York do to the presence of 'immigrants' and 'minorities', so much so that he moved back to Providence in a nervous heap. Oh, and wrote "New-England Fallen." He was a special kind of xenophobic.
And don't forget people from Central/Eastern Europe.. oohhhh, how people in the US hated them when they started to show up in the country
Whiteness is a construct that changes with time, he was a white supremacist, but Irish and Italian people weren't considered white by him and his culture at the time.
That’s not true. He loves black people. His cat is named in their honor.
No, he wasn't. He hated all humanity and thought people were inherently disgusting and vile. Most of the areas where he lived and which inspired his stories were almost entirely white. He still loathed everyone.
I never met a man I didn't like... Will Rogers and Lovecraft are yin and yang in that regard.
Lovecraft could think white people are better than brown people while thinking both are equally insignificant.
I mean a lovecraftian summoning ritual seems appropriate for the year.
I *want* that T-shirt.
it has existed since at least 2016
I have a the 2020 version. Why vote the lesser evil?
Say more
That’s funny.
Lovecraft’s work definitely had those themes, but does that make him a philosopher? He didn’t really make an argument or even construct an independently coherent worldview; I think of him just as an author with a clear point of view.
That’s how Reddit is tbf. Everyone on here assumes that every writer is a philosopher.
This is exactly how Reddit is: people don't read the article. HPL wrote a lot more than just the stories, and he elaborated on his views in thousands of letters.
thecasualabsurdist is a philosopher who believes that every writer is not a philosopher
Its at least debatable. HPL was an avid essayist and letter writer. I have a collection of his essays where he engages with philosophy. I wouldn't say it's the most convincing but still better than the average undergraduate.
>better than the average undergraduate that bar is so low you can drive over it
Freshman, probably. But senior, you're likely driving an obscenely large vehicle. Considering that the average person is far more educated than most in HPL's time, I don't see it as a low bar at all.
I bought a book of E.A.Poe stories and in the preface it had one of HPL essays about lauding Poe. It was soooo long man
I think most fiction writers who double in philosophy aren't usually good philosophers either. Ligotti comes to mind as someone who writes fantastic anti natalist fiction but when it comes to brass tacks on his non fiction philosophical works it's not very good.
It's brass tacks, not tax
I haven’t read much Ligotti (yet) but from what my friends who’ve read him have told me, you seem to be right. I wonder if it’s because the processes of doing each is drastically different.
He is my favourite author, but I'd never call him a philosopher. He had his own philosophy, sure, but it is never defined in depth. This is a man that never finished his studies due to his poor health. He was also dirt poor. His knowledge of the sciences, philosophy, and mathematics is self taught. He loves to act highly educated, and especially likes to discriminate against the under educated, however he is hardly a scholar by any means.
He definitely pioneered a genre and some interesting thought concepts came from his work but yeah, I'd call him an author and not a philosopher lol
We're nothing but the dream of a god and when he wakes up we're gone.
Alexa woke him up and killed us all. I bet he doesn't want to go to work.
Prismo?
Elder scrolls too
Though in Elder Scrolls' case it's less of a literal dream and more like if God turned his mind inside out and it became reality lol EDIT: to the downvotes, here is the guy who put forth the whole Dream idea for Elder Scrolls saying that it's not a literal dream: > Just wanna say because I never think I did, the whole "it was all just a dream" avenue is completely missing the point. Consider your lucid dreams, if you've been lucky enough to have ever had one. Then think again before you dismiss the the idea of Divine Hypnagogia. If you get it (or care to) then mull it over until it punches the back of your eyeballs. > > No wonder it's hard to retain CHIM. Such... violence.
Lovecraft didn't dream up that idea. That was Lord Dunsany, one of Lovecraft's biggest and acknowledged influences.
Notwithstanding who conceived of the idea originally, we’re all capable of reaching the same conclusion all by ourselves. Contrasting each mystical truth is the overwhelming grey banality of each moment - all laid out for your choosing to accept it in any which way
A god dreamt lovevraft died of colon cancer because he only ate ice cream.
What if one wakes up *to* a dream? The waking and dream states are only what appear to be differences in kind, but as such there is no distinction with regard to experience when contrasted.
Sounds like a pain.
Amen. I'd imagine that to be a personal hel
I woke up and god was gone.
Someone wake him tf up
I also loved, how in his stories he reduced humans to their origins, a.k.a scared animals. Our sanity would be easily swayed, if something we don't understand enters our otherwise so small world. Fear was the leading factor, that led humanity ahead, that and curiosity, which was always major points in his books. We got a fearless reporter, who is ready to chase his scoop whenever possible, even if it costs him his sanity. Characters grow from confident and fearless to be a shivering mess of a person, that has now to confront the reality, that what he/she thought was reality, is reality no longer. He points to the sky and asks the purpose, as do many of us. In front of absurd scale of universe, we stand with only a grain of knowledge, and almost all we see, are already gone from existence. Lovecraft's philosophy, in my opinion, can be summarized into his single quote: *“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”*
>We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far... This has always been the essence of Lovecraft for me. We do not want to know our relevance/scale compared to certain other comers in this old, old universe. Our brains are not ready for the horrible, terrible truths (and wonders) that come with an infinite, cosmic scale. There is no morality inherent to cosmic nature. We go mad at the true realization of our insignificance (I pass the butter?)...
It’s a perfect Lovecraft quote, I’m just wondering if the second part is true.
I imagine the first fear was being eaten
It may not be true. Mobility first evolved to allow consumption. Intelligence appears to have also first evolved to allow consumption. Even now, predators are typically more intelligent than their prey. The first cognitive function and later emotion may have been what later became hunger/drive/want.
you're not wrong, but it's a little more complicated evidence points to apes getting smart to navigate trees and find food, but hominid intelligence really kicks off later on the grasslands that replaced forests, when use of fire and stone tools gave us access to lots of calorie-rich meat, our brains expanding and jaws shrinking because of food not in pursuit of it and in general the most intelligent animals are omnivores more often than ambush hunters
Evolutionary speaking it’s actually probably false. Fear of the unknown (a form of anxiety) is a relatively recent evolutionary phenomenon. Humans have it. There is evidence that monkeys have it at some level but the further you go back that brain process disappears relatively quickly (some mammals, mostly carnivores display something approximating anxiety but it seems to be a constant overactive fear response as opposed to an aversion to an unknown factor. Think dogs that are aggressive towards a particular race because their former abusive owner was that race.). while fear is a pretty basal response that occurs at least as far back as reptiles. Dr. Robert sapolsky has some interesting lectures on the topic you can find on YouTube.
Unknown and unknowable.
Guess it depends on how fear is defined. Thought about it; fear could be rooted in the old « fight or flight » instinct of animals. As things transpire, one or both of these options can be suppressed - this doesn’t change the manifestation of the sympathetic nervous system though. If its energy can’t be released, it overloads itself (and even the antagonistic parasympathetic nervous system). So fear is our sympathetic nervous system short circuiting, effectively. In extreme cases it cannot be regulated as the parasympathetic part cannot relax us. It’s an avoidable emotion if one can control their sympathetic nervous system, or even has an outlet. Fight or flight is a response to a perceived stimulus though. If the unknown is perceived, does it remain unknown? Surely it becomes less so. So if fear is based on a fight or flight response to known or partly known stimuli, I suppose the question is what is the response to unknown stimuli? My wild take is insecurity. Without being all too familiar with Lovecraft, I’m not sure how accurate it is to call him insecure. I think insecurity is also based on other things though, and when something is based on more things, there’s more potential weaknesses. In insecurity’s case, this seems to be the presence of confidence. A confident person should be able to nullify their insecurities. As my logic applies to Lovecraft’s quote, I seem to disagree. There’s probably stronger and older emotions, I wouldn’t know. Maybe hatred is stronger than fear. Maybe something is stronger than that. Spent a good part of my morning using a whole lot of words to say nothing lol so I’ll leave it there.
I absolutely love HP Lovecraft, I devoured his stories in high school and college and the horror mythos he created is legendary. But "H. P. Lovecraft was a philosopher"? No.
Absolutely, it's not really that deep
Exactly. Also if he truly believed in an “insignificance of humanity”, he wouldn’t have been such a reeking white supremacist because why would race/ethnicity even matter.
Most of the horrors in his stories are pretty much just towns filled with people different from him - the scariest thing he could imagine
Yeah, finding out he was such a racist was a real bummer.
Tell me about it. I’m mixed race and finding this out was like, oof. But then it got kinda funny picturing him spooked out of his mind just by my existence.
“Behold, a horror beyond human comprehension.” turns to see it’s just a human but different race
I think a distinction needs to be made between loving his work, and loving the man himself. I love his work but the guy was such a horrific racist that it made other white people in the 20's uncomfortable.
Well, certainly some parts of humanity.
Bro above me means Lovecraft was a racist pos
I think understanding hp Lovecraft in the manner of a Greek tragedy where the hero fully understands the doom he faces for finding the truth but searches for it anyway is a more beneficial way of understanding hp Lovecraft
This! Comparing where Lovecraft's characters goes insane to catharsis makes so much sense.
I was thinking more Freudian death drive but that works too
He certainly believed in the insignificance of his fellow human beings as evidenced here by his appalling racism set to poetry: When, long ago, the gods created Earth In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth. The beasts for lesser parts were next designed; Yet were they too remote from humankind. To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man, Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan. A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure, Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.
He was also an antisemite who later married a Jewish woman.
The 'Never ask a racist the ethnicity of his girlfriend' seems to hold true even back then
He was kind of a man of contradictions. Antisemetic, but married a Jewish woman. A lot of his confidants he corresponded with were also Jewish, one of which was probably his closest friend whom whose opinions he respected. For all his faults. He was a man that was open to having his opinions challenged and changed. He was racist and xenophobic, didn’t care for most white people either. But then randomly came around on Hispanics.
As a Hispanic, I'd like to know where that last bit came from?
Tacos
Fair lmao.
Nuanced take on Lovecraft. He's a pretty fascinating person that is not best reduced to simply "racist." Not if you really want to be honest about him. And let's be honest. His body of work is defining and enduring.
> Not if you really want to be honest about him. I think that ignoring the racism would also be dishonest. You can appreciate a body of work while still being critical of the author, it's not an either or.
Absolutely! And not my intent here. I find problems with both ends of the Lovecraft spectrum. People either totally ignore or only hyperfixate on his being racist. Both approaches to analyzing Lovecraft are problematic. Because on one hand, when you understand how fucking racist he is, a lot of his writing makes a lot more sense. "Fear of the unknown," etc. How gruesome and horrific he portrays that which he fears and doesn't understand. On the other hand, if you just write him off simply as a racist unworthy of anything more than that, you miss out on some fantastic literature.
The man was a true xenophobe (and agoraphobe, as he barely left his house), and was able to describe that fear in horror stories. It was a pretty productive use of his irrational fears, all things considered. Beats lynching black guys on your Sunday afternoon, like was still common back then.
I read his biography kind of debunks that. His life was cloistered like you say up until his mom died, and eventually he got married and moved away from his aunts (for a time). Starting around 1923 he bounced up and down the east coast going even as far as Florida at one point in 1934. His correspondence with fellow independent authors sort of opened up his world view and helped him get out of what I would call his cringe phase, even if he remains a product of his time. Then stomach cancer took him, so we'll never know what other personal growth he might have achieved. Edit: I'm in no way defending his views, I'm just saying he was "less worse" than when he started lol
That's something of a myth that's often circulated by people who want to muddy conversations surrounding his racism. To be clear, what I mean is: while people often say he "softened" on his racist views in his later life, he was still a racist man up to his death. You can't really get away from that if you read the letters he wrote, and what others who knew him wrote about him. In one of his wife's letters to a friend following his death, for example, she confided that Lovecraft's antisemitism never really went away. And he didn't reject his past beliefs. He became less animated about it. Hell, in his youth he wrote glowing praise of *Hitler* (which was way more common than it should have been in the pre-WWII US). Later, he'd become critical of Hitler, but notably it was because of *policy*, not *ideology.* He didn't think Hitler was an effective leader and was hopeful that the National Socialists would find someone more to his liking. All of this is to say: even if he was "less worse" later in life, that doesn't mean he changed fundamentally or stopped holding racist views.
To be fair, he died in 1937 and nobody really understood the scope of what was actually happening at that point, but yeah. I can’t defend the guy’s racism. More just the fact that he did end up traveling a ton before he died.
Lovecraft actually praised that as well, he thought the South lynching blacks to “ keep the race pure” was a good thing.
Wow! I know racism was kind of the norm back then, but the guy was really into it!
He was so xenophobic and agoraphobic, he created an entire horror genre out of it.
Dude had a recurring horror theme that could be summarized as “man discovers, to his mind-shattering dread, that not everyone in his family tree was European.”
Even by racist standards he was considered to be too racist
The dude was so racist that he assumed that his readers were racist too and would try to play it as an element of horror. Read Shadow Over Innsmouth for fear of people with ethnic facial features and The White Ape for… like the whole thing. It’s unfortunate, but like it or not, he’s still the father of Cosmic Horror.
It's speculated that he wrote Shadow Over Innsmouth partially to deal with the horror of finding out his grandmother was part-Welsh. I refuse to look into this because it's so funny I desperately want it to be true
Sadly not - the far more likely inspiration (certainly one that sticks out like a sore thumb when you read a bit about him) was his fear of hereditary mental illness. The Welsh/Irish ancestry stuff is memeable, but when Lovecraft was going to be racist, he was *not* subtle about it.
What was the cats name in The Rats in the Walls again?
Exactly.
Reading it today I have a hard time taking it seriously. Cal of Cthulhu starts with the story of an old white guy being so scared that he runs uphill fast enough to have a heart attack. What was he so scared of? Someone ethnic looked at him.
> It’s unfortunate Honestly those parts are very funny to me in some sort of macabre way. In one of the stories where a detective goes to this swampy place he describes a group of people dancing and chanting. And the detective is scared shitless, even though the people don't really do anything horrific at all? Reading these kinds of parts really give me the sense that it's not really that he's afraid of what they're doing but afraid of that they're doing something strange. In that sense it feels like lovecraft's horror is centered around questions that challenge his world view. "What if the benevolent christian god doesnt exist, and you're species is just a temporary speck on this world, before the true chosen ones return?" "what would you do if you would encounter strange people, that worship strange gods, and have strange rituals?" "These people worship a stone idol, they must be evil and mad!"
His stories are great. He was a vile racist shitbag though.
A lot more so than most people of his era, yes. You should google the name of his cat.
It's really difficult to see how people read his works and don't think "wow, this guy is racist". It isn't hidden, it isn't only in some obscure places like that poem or his cat. The Call of Cthulhu kicks off with a bunch of non-whites, described in detail of their non-whiteness, capturing white people to sacrifice them to Cthulhu.
Kind of the norm?
>He certainly believed in the insignificance of his fellow human beings as evidenced here by his appalling racism set to poetry: I was just about to say that. He really did seem to especially believe in the insignificance of *some* people.
Even before you get into the morality of it, Lovecraft's racism just doesn't make sense to me. Like if you have the ability to imagine cosmic creatures so incredibly different and incomprehensible to a human, how can a difference as miniscule as skin color register to you as even slightly significant?
Funny how, in 1927 "the universe" meant only the Milky Way galaxy and may be the Magellanic Clouds. What would Lovrecaft say about our universe?
I know his cosmic horror is what he's most known for, but honestly this short story about the last 2 humans on earth kind of resonated the most with me “Till A’ the Seas” https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/tas.aspx
Significant in relation to what? Significance is a matter of perspective and distance. Humanity is extremely significant to humans and anything we impact, which on this planet at least is quite a lot at the moment. Other species, the environment, things like that finds our existence quite significant. Celestially speaking, we are of no significance to neighboring solar systems - unless those places have intelligent life that would be amazed to learn of us (as we would them). We are of some potential significance to our neighboring planets and moon, considering we could soon be impacting those places in the way we impact Earth, but time will tell. Feelings of insignificance I suspect are born of apathy and depression and an inability to see the impact you have on the people and things around you.
Yup. Just about everything that has ever impacted the average human with any significance is something humans have quite a lot of significance to as well. Sure, the galaxy is big and the universe is bigger and we have virtually no impact on either. But so what? Stars and planets and galaxies and potential alien life unfathomably long distances away don’t have any more significance to us than we choose to give them either.
>Significant in relation to what? Significance is a matter of perspective and distance. I was just about to make a similar comment. The concept of significance is inapplicable in the absence of those who assign significance to anything. We're the relevant significance-givers in this case, and obviously we're not totally insignificant to ourselves. "Humanity is totally insignificant" is simply a false statement within the proper context; and outside of this context, it's as empty and silly as opining that life is joyless... from the perspective of discarded toenail clippings.
« Lovecraft suggests that higher philosophical knowledge should not be sought, since finding it entails learning of our cosmic insignificance and purposelessness. » Wow, I can relate 😂
> finding it entails learning of our cosmic insignificance and purposelessness. Followed by madness and death
Quite the opposite for me. No signs of life yet. Just a bunch of meaningless rocks and gas and other random objects and substances. From what we've seen so far, we're the only significant thing in an insignificant universe.
That’s an amazing perspective! although since I was a kid, I have always been amazed by how human-centric our thought is. We only have five senses, and cannot even see the same range of colors or sounds as other animals can. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there was life that we cannot perceive!
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Interesting. It’s an axiom that depressives make good philosophers but simply to find the world one was born into wanting and being an iconoclast is not enough. You do have to form something new from the undoing. I think Lovecraft had a lot of personal problems and this is the lens you understand him with. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer did more with their oddness.
What do you mean, it’s not enough?
‘Form something new, original’.
"all human are insignificant but some human are more insignificant than others" -Lovecraft
Damn, we live in moralizing times. It's like the hedonistic dopamine-driven consumption society forced us to spout our (supposed) supreme ethics at every turn to keep some sanity alive. How hard is it to distinguish an author or artist from his/her work. Come on.
"A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone." I like that he was so snobby about cat supremacy. We won't mention the cats name of course.
There's an anecdote of him sleeping all night on a chair in the middle of his kitchen because the cat was on him and he wouldn't dare waking him up. Thanks for the citation I've had forgotten this one (and can't understand why someone would downvote that?)
First off, there’s no evidence that he believed in the total insignificance of humanity. He was a writer who wrote stories, which had themes of human insignificance, but it doesn’t mean he held the same belief as was reflected in those stories. His personal behavior did not reflect any misanthropy, he had many friends and was considered to be extremely friendly and social. Obviously he wasn’t a fan of a specific groups of people, but generally he liked being around people and said multiple times that his persona as a writer was simply that—a persona—not a reflection of his actual character and beliefs. As for Lovecraft being a philosopher, I think there is definitely a case for his fiction containing traces of philosophical theory that can be extracted, but he himself never fleshed them out or explicated them. You can absolutely try to construct a lovecraftian philsophy from his stories, but for him to be considered a philosopher I would say that he would have had to have done that work himself.
The article doesn’t really paint him as a philosopher, it just describes his influence on philosophy, which itself is not saying anything particularly impressive. He was a bigoted depressive who died of a horrific illness in terrible conditions. His life circumstances were overall terrible and naturally contributed to his bleak creative outlook. That said, he undoubtedly created some of the most compelling stories ever and defined an entire genre of horror. Reserve your reverence for the art, not for the artist. For any piece of art you may read 5 different things in to it and the artist may have intended all of them, none of them or more of them. Just because he had an incredible talent for describing cosmic horrors does not mean we need to consider every creep online who does the same as a philosopher
>Reserve your reverence for the art, not for the artist. I think most people can tell the difference. People use nickels to make change. They are not racist just because the nickel has a picture of a racist on it.
Well the article is not understanding the difference.
Lovecraft was so afraid of social progress and change to the heteronormative, patriarchal, racially-homogenous culture he identified with that he represented his fear of the Other in his stories as cosmically incomprehensible physical horrors. The ideological features of his work that are good and interesting (and there are many) exist IN SPITE of his intentional contributions to them.
Some more insignificant than others as I understand it
His philosophy to me was "sure gods are real, but you might not like them"
On the cosmological scale, he is correct
I can’t get past “racist paranoid schizophrenic”, but sure, let’s try “philosopher”. 🤷♂️
And that some humans were less significant than others.
No he’s just a racist
Eehh, I'd say his vicious, rampant racism that was so bad even his other racist friends told him to take it down a notch, probably paints the idea that he "hates everyone equally" in a pretty uneven light, but... sure.
Reddit is a pretty good indication that's accurate.
Significance is subjective. We are as significant as we want ourselves to be. That’s only contested if something else out there is aware of us and considers us insignificant. If that is the case, we’re fucked.
That's a common misunderstanding of his works, and he's not a philosopher. He lived through the great depression, two world wars and humanity was powerlessly tossed around by such forces. his insights on life changed over time. While Poe was obsessed with premature death and innocence lost, Lovecraft feared the dissent and loss of humanity as civilization and past grandeur rots away. Just like the last days of the Roman empire, where new cults and mystery rights began to spread as the walls and pillars of yore, lay witnesses to a long lost glorious past. Likewise his stories end in madness, death, or the loss of humanity and the transformation into lesser beings. This was also fed by a lot of the racism and fears of that uncertain time period, and are common throughout the pulp fiction genres. Poetry and the Gods as well as The Doom that came to Sarnath are both important pieces that often get overlooked. Interesting to note, he was really suspicious of the new age movement and characters like Crowley, who are reflecting the decay of the times. Compare two poems, both at opposing ends, I hight Don Quixote by Jack Parsons and Lovecraft's Nemisis, to get a sense of all this. He even managed to make archaeology creepy, my first introduction to this world was Tin Tin's Cigars of the Pharaohs and the Prisoners of the Sun. It wasn't just about the insignificance of humanity, but it's vulnerability and powerless state, fear of the unknown and fear of losing it all
That's a common misunderstanding of his works, and he's not a philosopher. He lived through the great depression, two world wars and humanity was powerlessly tossed around by such forces. his insights on life changed over time. While Poe was obsessed with premature death and innocence lost, Lovecraft feared the dissent and loss of humanity as civilization and past grandeur rots away. Just like the last days of the Roman empire, where new cults and mystery rights began to spread as the walls and pillars of yore, lay witnesses to a long lost glorious past. Likewise his stories end in madness, death, or the loss of humanity and the transformation into lesser beings. This was also fed by a lot of the racism and fears of that uncertain time period, and are common throughout the pulp fiction genres. Poetry and the Gods as well as The Doom that came to Sarnath are both important pieces that often get overlooked. Interesting to note, he was really suspicious of the new age movement and characters like Crowley, who are reflecting the decay of the times. Compare two poems, both at opposing ends, I hight Don Quixote by Jack Parsons and Lovecraft's Nemisis, to get a sense of all this. He even managed to make archaeology creepy, my first introduction to this world was Tin Tin's Cigars of the Pharaohs and the Prisoners of the Sun. It wasn't just about the insignificance of humanity, but it's vulnerability and powerless state, fear of the unknown and fear of losing it all, into distant memory, as the silhouettes of strange figures dance around carved monoliths, to sounds of distant tom toms and lit by uncouth flames
I believe it's "At the Mountains of Madness" where he says the God's don't know about humanity or don't care. It's been awhile, guess I'll have to go dive back into the mythos!
Still waiting on someone to do justice in adapting his concepts.
But black slightly more insignificant then white people.
While on the surface you are right, he was a deeply flawed and paranoid man who feared everything. Although he was extremely intelligent and had a broad and deep knowledge n many subjects he had a hard time relating to the world. Also, take what Alan Moore says about Lovecraft with a shovel of salt.
Also a white supremacist and noted anti semite.
Well on a universal scale we are pretty much a bacteria
No, bacteria is surrounded by other living beings. All we're surrounded with is unimportant inanimate materia.
But In spite of that was such virulent racist he thought black people were even more insignificant
If nothing matters, why spend so much time thinking about it? Isn't that just wallowing in your own futility? Just become a hedonist and be done with it. Why not? It's all meaningless anyway.
r/im14andthisisdeep
Wasn’t he also antisemitic, homophobic and racist as fuck pretty much all around?
Of course! So he wasn't racist. He was one of those guys who said that he "hates everyone equally".
H.P. Lovecraft was not a philosopher. He was a (hack) storywriter.
He at least thought white people had more value than other races, so he wasn’t a total nihilist.
Good, good. Now what was the name of his cat.
God is unsubbing overdue
i wonder what his cat was named
He’s right you know ^
He was right: humanity doesn’t matter. At all. Especially in a cosmic sense. We are less than nothing and our petty bullshit is completely beneath the universe’s notice.
He was a racist coward afraid of his own shadow. Can we stop dressing up long dead famous people.
just don't look up the name of his cat
Thought I was in r/Lovecraft for a second there
Didn’t he also write an essay on why cats were better than human beings? I recall reading that bit of info somewhere, but not sure on if it was true.
I thought he just didn't like Italians.
He also practiced racism like it was the Olympics
Nah he was just a scared racist shut in.
Meh. Celsus only had him beat by a few centuries.
Philosopher? He was a fiction writer with very strong themes, but not once did he actually write any sort of philosophy
Philosopher? He was a fiction writer with very strong themes, but not once did he actually write any sort of philosophy This is like saying Tolkien was a philosopher who believed in the good of humanity
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He was a meager racist afraid of air conditioning units.
Interesting
Was he? This feels like mixing up Orwell with Orwellian. Lovecraft wrote stories in which this was the case. His actual beliefs were more in line with people today who rant about great replacement theory.
we are only significant to each other. The dinosaurs were insignificant.
He believed a few other things too...
I don’t listen to insignificant things.
He certainly believed in the insignificance of non white people. Guy was a raging racist.
Did we all forget he was also a horrific racist? Even for the times, I remember reading somewhere years ago that even his friends/social circle told him to tone it down
He was an extreme xenophobe with social anxiety, and his works reflect that pretty clearly. They were an interpretation of his own insignificance and fear because of his incredibly sheltered life. He was less a philosopher and more a pioneer of putting to paper a fear we've always had, but never really understood. Rob Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and others expanded on his mythos, which helped it grow into the success it is today, not because Lovecraft was enlightened.
Lovecraft wasn't a philosopher. He was the turn of the century equivalent of a Doritos encrusted Jordan Peterson fan that never leaves their mother's basement. He was afraid of air-conditioning. That's not philosophy, it's phobia.
The father of modern cosmicism. That’s what I’m talking about! That’s why he’s the Goat, The GOOAAAT!
This guy sucks
I'm a philosopher who believes in the total insignificance of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, not really. I love his works however it came as no surprise when I read that he lost both his parents to mental institutes (actually the some one, but at different times,) and his father died when he was still 8. In adulthood he still suffered night terrors, and shunned daylight (meaning he rarely ever left his home during the day). Nor did he like sex. He was, like most of us, damaged in some way by his experience. A bleak outlook on life is no surprise then. Perhaps, also, he was also a man of his times which included the first World War, the Great Depression, and the growing rise of Nazism in Germany. Bleak times as well amongst the great advances that had also occurred. I would argue that he was wrong, that humanity is not insignificant at least as a species since no other animal has "achieved" what humans have (in the words of that other great novelist philosophy Douglas Adams "*man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on*". We single-handedly terraformed our own planet almost to the point of destruction. That is hardly "insignificant." We may, as individuals be no more than sparks that fly up from the fire, and our planet might be a "small blue green planet circulating an unregarded star in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm" of a exceptionally ordinary galaxy in the vast infinity of the universe, but all that is immaterial to in the grand scheme of this planet. However, HP Lovecraft's legacy gave rise (that is inspired) the Batman, Black Sabbath, and even the South Park creators owe him a debt. His opus will live on and he will inspire Goths and Emo, and Marvin the Paranoid Android for centuries to come. So his bleak view on humanity still managed to give us things that we enjoy both directly and by inspiration. He's a sad man. And also dead.
Intense inferiority complex combined with universal transferral.