@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3333},
      author = {Fox, Joshua Isaac},
      title = {Existential Pessimism and Aesthetic Experience: Mill,  Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on Life's Value},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {258},
      abstract = {I examine how three major 19th-century philosophers –  Mill, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – confronted the problem  of pessimism: the worry that life might not be worth  living. I demonstrate how all three took this problem to  stem from concerns about the structure of human desires and  interests, concerns Mill and Nietzsche both took  specifically aesthetic value to play an essential role in  answering. Taken together, these thinkers’ engagement with  pessimism highlights two different aspects of aesthetic  value’s importance to human well-being: human beings need  to value things in an aesthetic manner, and they also need  to view themselves as possessing a particularly aesthetic  kind of dignity. In the absence of aesthetic valuing, human  beings are unable to maintain non-aversive desires: that  is, desires directed towards the good rather than merely  away from the bad. In the absence of aesthetic dignity, the  same aesthetic valuing needed to get our desires in shape  would subject us to debilitating forms of self-contempt and  self-disgust.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3333},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3333},
}