Pessimism

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Pessimism, in its philosophical sense, is the position that existence is on balance not worth having: that suffering outweighs satisfaction, that the goods of life do not redeem its costs, and that non-being would have been the better outcome. The word in ordinary speech names a mood or a temperament. As a doctrine it is an argued claim about the value of life as such, and it asks to be judged as one.

The term entered the European vocabulary in the nineteenth century, and the position is bound above all to Arthur Schopenhauer, who held that the underlying reality of the world is a blind, restless will that drives every living thing and is never satisfied. On his account desire is suffering — to want is to lack — and the brief relief of satisfaction only clears the ground for the next want or for boredom. Happiness, on this reading, is mostly the absence of pain, a negative quantity; the balance sheet of a life cannot come out ahead. He drew openly on Indian sources, reading the Upanishads and what of Buddhism reached him as confirmation that the wise response was the quieting of the will rather than its feeding. Later writers extended the line in their own directions — Leopardi in poetry, Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer in systems of their own, and in the twentieth century the aphorisms of Cioran.

Philosophers distinguish several things the word can mean, and the distinctions matter. There is the metaphysical claim that the world is governed by an irrational principle indifferent to human good; the evaluative claim that the disvalue of existence exceeds its value; and the practical claim about how one ought then to live — whether by resignation, by asceticism, or by the refusal to bring new life into being. A pessimist about value need not despair in temperament, and a gloomy temperament argues nothing about value; the doctrine stands or falls on the case made for it.

The affinity with older world-rejecting currents is real and worth following, though it should not be collapsed. The Gnostic teaching that the visible world was the botched work of a lesser god, and the recurring ascetic verdict that embodied life is a thing to be escaped rather than enjoyed, share with philosophical pessimism a refusal to take the world as straightforwardly good. But the Gnostic answer was a divine spark and a way home, and the ascetic’s was release into a higher state; Schopenhauer’s was, at its starkest, no home at all — only the will’s silencing. The resemblance lies in the diagnosis, not in the cure. What philosophical pessimism added to the older religious complaint was the proposal that the verdict could be reached, and defended, without any appeal to a fall, a creator, or a world beyond this one.

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