Taking Pessimism Seriously
Pessimism today has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, even a cursory glance at the world reveals a depressing abundance of dreadful events, tendencies, and phenomena. Wars, violence, the immense immiseration of human lives, deteriorating democratic systems, the intense destruction of natural environments fill the news. At more personal levels, even relatively good human lives are ones of anxious uncertainty, frustration, overwork, strife, worry and other sources of suffering. Perhaps there are fortunate souls who pass their days in serene calm, but those will be the very few. For the rest of us, a pessimistic sense of our current predicament and its future prospects is rational, to the point of undeniability.
On the other hand, many voices condemn pessimism or – more carefully – condemn the attitudes which they see as associated with pessimism. The problem, for them, will be what pessimism can do to our motivation, hope, and sense of the fixability of the future. Forms of pessimism feeding a self-abnegating fatalism or a despairing passivity should be condemned – the pessimism that stands and stares, say. Other forms of pessimism, however, should be esteemed, since they can rouse us into action. Things are bad, so say these pessimists, but they can be made better, if ‘we’ make things better. Movements, marches, ‘calls to arms’ – these should flow from pessimism into a resolute optimism. The activist must, after all, be a pessimist up to a point. Life is bad – but can be made better.
Optimism and pessimism
How can we reconcile these different attitudes towards pessimism? Well, by thinking more carefully and soberly about the nature and complexity of pessimism. As modern scholars point out, pessimism in its philosophical forms is diverse. Moreover, pessimism can coexist with optimism: the dualism of optimism vs. pessimism – as in the question ‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?’ – is common but crude. No serious account of the human condition fits into this dualism. Most doctrines of pessimisms are a complex composite of optimisms and pessimisms – one could, for instance, be optimistic about some things, and pessimistic about others, or be pessimistic about the short-term while optimistic about the long-term. Moreover, these optimistic and pessimistic convictions can have more or less specific objects and different degrees of certainty. We should say, then, that a pessimist is someone in whom the pessimisms predominate.
Humans are constitutively incapable of virtuous forms of life. Posthumans, of course, can aspire to much more.
This composite model of pessimism helps explain the ambivalence mentioned earlier. One may be despairingly pessimistic about the short-term social, environmental and political condition of humankind. One might, though, also think that our longer-term prospects are better. Perhaps an experience of massive environmental collapse will inspire a moral renaissance – or the groups and ideologies driving our collective crapulence will be overthrown – and so on. In his recent book, Humans: How We F*cked Everything Up, the writer Ian Phillips suggests that our biggest failing is that we never learn. We keep making the same mistakes, again and again. Still, an optimist might suggest that we’ll eventually start doing better, and stop ‘f*cking things up’. If contemporary ‘philanthroptimists’ like Rutger Bregman are right, we Homo sapiens are essentially good by nature, albeit straitjacketed by the imperfect social arrangements, habits and self-conceptions we have inherited. But one can escape our straitjackets – to take the metaphor seriously – and perfect the imperfect. Short-term pessimism is wed to long-term optimism and shored up by activist aspirations, an encouraging perspective on human history, and a genial philosophical anthropology.
Is this to endorse an aspirational optimism? No, for two sets of reasons. The first are significant problems with the philanthroptimist claims. Bregman, for instance, offers an comforting anthropology beset with ambiguities and dodgy argumentative moves (such as his pathologisation of rival, alternative stances, like pessimism, as ‘clinical symptoms’ of a ‘mean world syndrome’). The second set of problems, on which I focus, concern the pessimist components of the composite model. A more complex account of pessimisms will – if I am right – offset any hopeful expectations about the eventual triumph of optimism.
To explain why I need to offer a more complex account of philosophical pessimism.
The human condition
I suggested that a pessimist is someone whose appraisal of the human condition is dominated by pessimisms. But this needs spelling out. For a start, what is meant by pessimism – a term, after all, with several popular and philosophical senses. Sometimes, a pessimist is someone with a gloomy, jaded personality that is contrasted with the cheery energy of the optimist. Sometimes, a pessimist is the one prone to expect things to turn out for the worse: a headshaking nay-sayer who dogmatically counsels defeat. Combining these images, the pessimist sees the glass as half-empty and also as unfillable. In its more philosophical senses, a pessimist judges our world to be, in Schopenhauer’s famous remark, ‘the worst of all possible worlds’, so dreadful that nothing worse could exist since, if it did, it could collapse into non-existence.
The popular senses express what are really kinds of attitudes or mental states and Schopenhauer’s account describes should be seen as an especially intense, hyperbolic expression of pessimism. Each disguises, in its own way, the conceptual core of philosophical pessimism, which is a pair of related judgments: (a) there are entrenched features of the human condition destructive of the possibility of a good life, and, (b) there is little to no prospect of these features changing, or being changed, for the better. Our condition is a bad one and will remain so.
Of course, different philosophers offer different elaborations of these bare claims. Schopenhauer, for instance, emphasises the painful, inescapable dialectic of desire, fleeting satisfaction, and painful frustration and disappointment integral to human life. Desiring or striving reflects the absence, from our lives, of people or things we judge to be good. If we fulfil our desires, we become bored or anxious and rush off in pursuit of further fulfilments. If we fail to fulfil our desires, we experience sadness, anger, and other painful emotions. Moreover, these desirings are the basis for vices such as envy, jealously, and resentment, as well as the alienation, competition, distrust, and hatred that corrupts our relationships with other people. If all this sounds grim, Schopenhauer also adds that it is impossible, and unthinkable, to remove this dialectic of desiring from human life. The Will – this system of anticipation, desire, and all its attendant miseries – is integral to what we know as the human condition. Only in moments of aesthetic contemplation can this pulsating will be quieted, at least for a time.
A rhetoric of slowness and speed has been used by philosophers since the ancient periods to characterise and assess different ways of life.
Schopenhauer, then, thinks our condition is bad and also incapable of significant improvement. Of course, this chimes with his reputation as the philosophical pessimist par excellence. However, as historians of philosophy have shown, Schopenhauer was not the only pessimist in recent history of European philosophy and, perhaps, not the most important in late nineteenth century Germany. As the eminent scholar Frederick Beiser showed in Weltschmerz, the nineteenth century Germany ‘pessimism controversy’ had many players, including Friedrich Mainlander and the arguable leading figure, Eduard van Hartmann. Moreover, as Joshua Foa Dienstag and Mara van der Lugt showed in their own books, those German controversies were stages in a much deeper cultural and philosophical histories. This history of pessimism has ancient roots: one can find darkly negative appraisals of the human condition among ancient Greek, Christian and other writers – from Sophocles to the Book of Ecclesiastes to the lamentations of Heraclitus of Ephesus, traditionally depicted as weeping at the sorrows and sufferings of human life. For them, pessimism reflects the dreadfulness of the human condition as such, not local, transient political or environmental conditions. Pessimism about human life, then, is nothing new.
Getting better?
A natural critical response is to emphasise the different worlds within which these historical pessimists worked. It may have seemed human life was dreadful back then, goes the objection, but things are better now. Sanitation, reason and science, medical advances and much else mean that to be human now is much better than it was then. While those earlier pessimists were right then, it is wrong to treat those appraisals as perennial. The terribleness of life owes to an array of transient features of life, at least for most of those pessimism-inducing features. Optimism and progress will eventually prevail over pessimism, suffering, and despair, as the ‘better angels’ of our nature slowly overpower those darker forces – like irrationality and cruelty – that register earlier, less enlightened stages in our collective history.
A pessimist can respond to these narratives of progress in several ways. To start with, even if this story is true, the human condition has features that cannot be rectified. Our mortality and susceptibility to grief at the death of persons and possibilities central to our lives cannot be removed, at least unless one indulges in zealous transhumanist fantasies. It is true that we can cure diseases, but we cannot escape the death built into our mortality.
The second response rejects the narratives – as exaggerated at best or as false at worst. Optimists oversell our past achievements and overpromise on our future. The psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, describes marvellous reductions in interpersonal violence over time and offers an assurance of future moral progress. But as historians argued, Pinker’s definitions and interpretations are dodgy. The complexities of historical processes are not amenable to graphs and pie charts. Anyway, at best what Pinker can show is a reduction in certain kinds of violence – the one-on-one violence of murder or manslaughter, say. There are whole other types of violence, like the structural violence built into state institutions, which go unmentioned. Worse, varieties of violence only encompass some of the failings of human life. Pinker offers us no reason to think there has been any substantial historical reduction in incidences of, for instance, dishonesty, greediness, envy, hypocrisy, self-righteousness and other vices – all of which, one suspects, remain manifestly pervasive features of human life.
A third response made by a pessimistic to narratives of optimistic progress has a different character. It involves an important distinction between what we may call perennial and particular features of human life. Certain features and aspects of the human condition are perennial – permanent, enduring features of what it means to be human. Grief and mortality are perennial, even if their specific forms will be shaped by local features of this or that form of human life. Other pessimism-inducing features, though, are particular to certain forms that human life can take (certain social or political systems, economic arrangements, and so on). The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, for instance, speaks of the ‘signature afflictions’ of life in technological capitalist societies – ‘burnout’, for instance, or depression masked by facile cultures of cheerfulness. Such afflictions are the products of the particularities of late modern forms of human life – not, therefore, ones endemic to the human condition.
In our societies, an impressive array of vices is on display. Hypocrisy, greed, cruelty, prejudice… But what if many of these vices were necessary for human life?
Ambivalence
This distinction of perennial and particular aspects is not crisply drawn. Many aspects of human life occupy a broad grey area. Is our grotesque abuse of animals, for instance, a particular feature of what the activist Melanie Joy calls ‘carnist’ societies, or a product of more perennial features of human life? How about our warlikeness or tribalism or susceptibility to comforting and self-serving delusions? In practice, different pessimists debate these details. What is plausible, though, is the thought that some very significant aspects are perennial.
It’s hard to find peaceful, ‘animal-friendly’ communities which endured. Most human societies are all enthusiastic participations in what J.M. Coetzee judged the ‘crime of stupefying proportions’ committed against animals. If one reads the Buddha’s catalogues of our vices and failings, it is striking that none of them are unfamiliar. Greed, hatred, covetousness, selfishness, moral laziness, envy, and other failings… none of them have gone extinct in the centuries since the Buddha complied those catalogues. None of my students, reading the suttas, has ever said, ‘“Greed?” What’s that?’
The particular-perennial distinction is also muddied by another ironically pessimistic consideration. Even if some negative aspects of human life were originally contingent features of particular societies, they have now ‘gone viral’ and characterise all, or almost all, of human life. As many anti-capitalist critics complain, greed and exploitativeness have been exported by European and American societies. Similarly the vices of technological societies – such as the aggressive and intrusive imperatives to dominate – are by now global in scope. If so, what began as the local failings of particular peoples are now enduring and universal parts of humankind. In one favourite metaphor of misanthropes, humans are a cancer, virus or plague that infects the world, or – in one of the Buddha’s favourites – a ‘fire’ that cannot be extinguished, not least since we continually fuel it with our attachments, cravings and selfish ambitions.
Still, these qualifications aside, the distinction between perennial and particular aspects of the human condition is useful for thinking about pessimism. If so, pessimism will be composite in a double sense – a composite of pessimist and optimist components, on the one hand, and particular and perennial aspects of our condition, on the other. There will be – indeed, there is – energetic debate, among philosophical pessimists, about the exact ‘composition’ of their own brands of pessimism. After all, there are various aspects of the human condition, reflection on which could inform a negative appraisal of our condition. Moreover, if the human condition evolves over time, disagreements can partly reflect different empirical circumstances, as well as different philosophical judgments. What can be true – and what for a pessimist is true – is that our condition is and is going to remain a very bad one.
I have not tried in this piece to ‘prove’ the truth of these pessimist judgments. I do hope, though, to have shown the importance of adopting a more complex understanding of pessimism. It can coexist in a complex composite with the different forms of optimism. It tracks both particular and perennial aspects of the human condition. It also involves both contestable philosophical claims and often-uncertain empirical realities. If so, no wonder it invites ambivalence, as well as disquiet.
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My thanks to David E. Cooper for helpful comments on a draft of this essay.
Ian James Kidd on Daily Philosophy:
Cover image: Midjourney.
