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.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), to whom philosophical pessimism is most closely bound, photographed by Johann Schäfer in 1859. — Johann Schäfer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The vocabulary is younger than the thing it names. Pessimism is built from the Latin pessimus, “worst,” the superlative of malus, on the exact model of optimism from optimus, “best” — the two terms are mirror coinages, and the younger was made to answer the elder. The English word first appears in 1794, in a letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; it settles into its strict metaphysical sense — the doctrine that this is the worst of possible worlds, or that all things tend toward the bad — only in the 1830s, by which time it had become the name for a position associated above all with one philosopher. The optimist pole it was minted against is the older one: the claim, given its sharpest form by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, that a perfect God could only have actualized the best of all possible worlds, evils and all. Pessimism is in part the refusal of exactly that ledger — but a refusal that, in its strongest nineteenth-century form, no longer argues against a good God at all. It dispenses with the God.

Schopenhauer and the will

The position is bound above all to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who held that the underlying reality of the world is a blind, restless will that drives every living thing and is never satisfied. His system runs through the distinction he took from Kant: the world as it presents itself, ordered in space, time, and causality, is representation — phenomenon — while the world as it is in itself, the thing-in-itself that Kant had left a closed door, Schopenhauer proposed to name. He called it Will: not a person’s deliberate willing but a groundless, aimless striving that is the inner nature of everything, the force in the falling stone as much as in the hungry animal. The doctrine is set out in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, first volume 1818, dated 1819; greatly expanded with a second volume in 1844), and in the late essays of the Parerga und Paralipomena (1851) that finally made him famous.

From this metaphysics the verdict on life follows as a deduction rather than a sigh. If the essence of every creature is will — striving — then to be alive is to want, and to want is to lack. Desire is the felt presence of an absence; so long as it is unsatisfied it is suffering, and the moment it is satisfied it does not deliver lasting contentment but only clears the ground for the next want, or, in the brief interval with nothing left to want, for boredom. Schopenhauer drew the conclusion that human life swings, like a pendulum, between pain and boredom, with satisfaction as the thin and vanishing point between them. Happiness, on this reading, is not a positive thing one acquires but the temporary absence of a pain — a negative quantity, the silence after a noise. Pleasures are smaller and rarer than they look; pains are larger and more certain. The balance sheet of a life, kept honestly, cannot come out ahead. That is the core of the case: not that this person or that age suffers, but that suffering is structural, written into the form of willing itself, so that no rearrangement of circumstances could redeem it.

He drew openly on Indian sources. In March 1814 he borrowed from the Weimar library Anquetil-Duperron’s Oupnek’hat, a Latin version of a Persian rendering of the Upanishads, and kept that book near him for the rest of his life, calling it the consolation of his living and the consolation of his dying. He named the Upanishads, Plato, and Kant as the three foundations of his thought. What he found in the Indian material — and later in what of Buddhism reached a European reader of his generation — he read as confirmation arriving from another direction: that the wise response to a world of ceaseless craving is not to feed the will but to quiet it. He noted the correspondence between his own doctrine and the Buddhist diagnosis that craving is the root of suffering, and treated the saint’s renunciation, the turning of the will against itself, as the only genuine release the system allows. He came to Buddhism after his own structure was built, and read it as a parallel rather than a borrowing — which is the honest way to hold the relation, and a caution against the temptation to make pessimism the secret meaning of a tradition that frames craving and its cessation as a path, not a balance-sheet. The Buddhist verdict opens onto karma, rebirth, and a cessation that is its own kind of peace; Schopenhauer’s denial of the will keeps the diagnosis and lets the soteriology go.

Three senses of the word

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 — Schopenhauer’s blind will is the type-case, a ground of being that is not benevolent, not malevolent, simply without regard. There is the evaluative claim, narrower and more portable, that the disvalue of existence exceeds its value — a thesis one could in principle hold without any particular metaphysics of the will, simply on the accounting of goods against ills. And there is the practical claim about how one ought then to live: whether by resignation, by asceticism and the deliberate starving of desire, or, at the limit, by the refusal to bring new life into being and so to start the cycle of wanting again in another. These come apart. A pessimist about value need not despair in temperament — some of the tradition’s authors are mordantly cheerful — and a gloomy temperament argues nothing about value. The doctrine stands or falls on the case made for it, not on the disposition of the one who makes it. This is the line that separates philosophical pessimism from mere low spirits, and from the cultural narratives of decline — the sense that one’s own age is falling away from a better past — with which it is often confused; metaphysical pessimism makes no claim that things were once better, only that existence as such does not pay.

The pessimist line after Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer’s argument did not stay an argument. In Germany it set off a sustained dispute, the Pessimismusstreit or pessimism controversy of the later nineteenth century, in which the value of life — rather than the logic of the sciences — became for a while the live question of philosophy. The controversy had defenders who built systems of their own and critics who thought the whole accounting confused.

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), whose poetry voiced a pessimism of clear sight; portrait by Luigi Lolli, 1826. — Luigi Lolli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In poetry the line runs through Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), whose vast notebook, the Zibaldone, and whose Operette morali (1827) and late Canti — above all “La ginestra” (“The Broom”), composed in 1836 on the slope of Vesuvius — set out a pessimism of clear sight: nature indifferent or hostile, the illusions of progress and consolation stripped away, and a fragile human solidarity proposed in their place, the broom flowering on volcanic ash. His was a poet’s pessimism, not a metaphysician’s, and it reached the verdict by way of disenchantment rather than a doctrine of the will.

Vesuvius in eruption, the volcanic slope on which Leopardi composed “La ginestra”; watercolor by J. M. W. Turner, c. 1817. — J. M. W. Turner, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In system-building the chief heirs took Schopenhauer’s frame and rebuilt it. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), in the Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869 — a book that ran to nine editions within two decades), fused Schopenhauer’s will with Hegel’s idea into an unconscious ground of the world, and argued through a famous three-stage analysis that the hope of happiness is illusory at every level, in this life, in any afterlife, and in any future of the species, so that the cosmic task is a collective renunciation of the will to live.

Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), whose Philosophy of the Unconscious fused Schopenhauer’s will with Hegel’s idea. — Photographer unknown, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876), in Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption, first volume 1876), pressed the logic to its darkest point: where Schopenhauer found a will-to-life, Mainländer found a will-to-death, and told a cosmogony in which a primordial unity, choosing its own non-being, shattered into the world — the dispersal of a God who willed to die, the universe its slow decomposition toward the nothing it is bound for. He hanged himself days after the first volume was printed.

Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876), who pressed pessimism to a will-to-death and a cosmogony of a God who chose non-being. — Author unknown, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) carried the pessimist account into a dialectic of a self-contradictory will. Against all of them stood critics — Eugen Dühring and the neo-Kantians chief among them — who held that the balance of pleasure and pain cannot be totalled in the way the argument requires, that the very attempt to weigh existence as a whole is a category mistake.

Emil Cioran (1911–1995) in Paris, who made of pessimism a literary form of edged aphorism. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In the twentieth century the voice changed register again, from system to aphorism. Emil Cioran (1911–1995), writing first in Romanian and then in a polished French, made of pessimism a literary form: On the Heights of Despair (1934), written at twenty-two, and the late The Trouble with Being Born (1973), where the case against existence is pressed to the threshold of birth itself, and delivered not as a deduction but as a sequence of edged fragments. The argument had become a sensibility one inhabits — which is, in part, what the modern study of the tradition has tried to recover.

The older world-rejection, and what is new

Philosophical pessimism keeps company with the older world-rejecting currents, but parts from them on the one point that decides everything. The Gnostic teaching that the visible world was the botched work of a lesser god — a demiurge who fashioned a prison rather than a home — 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. The Neoplatonic ascent away from multiplicity toward the One, and the gnosis that was a knowing the way out, both rest on the conviction that the soul is not at home here. 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, a turning-against rather than an ascending-toward. The resemblance lies in the diagnosis, not in the cure. The Gnostic and the ascetic complain of this world because there is a better one to which they belong; the philosophical pessimist complains of existence as such, with nowhere to be repatriated to.

This marks what philosophical pessimism added to the older religious complaint: the proposal that the verdict could be reached, and defended, without any appeal to a fall, a creator, or a world beyond this one. Where the acosmist dissolves the world’s reality into the Absolute and the optimist of the best of all possible worlds underwrites it with a good God, the pessimist takes the world at full reality and finds it, weighed, not worth the having. It is the secular continuation of an ancient grievance — which is also why it sits uneasily with the confident positivism of its own century, sharing that movement’s refusal of consoling metaphysics while drawing from the refusal the opposite mood.

Scholarship and sources

Philosophical pessimism, long treated as an embarrassment or a temperament, has been reconstituted in recent decades as a genuine philosophical tradition with its own arguments and its own internal disputes. Two studies are foundational. Joshua Foa Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, 2006) argues that there is a coherent, neglected pessimist tradition that is an ethic rather than a mood — a way of living adopted in the absence of belief in progress — and sorts its figures into a cultural pessimism (Rousseau, Leopardi), a metaphysical pessimism (Schopenhauer, Freud), and an existential pessimism (Camus, Unamuno, Cioran), with a separate place for Nietzsche’s attempt at a Dionysian affirmation in the teeth of the same verdict (record). Frederick C. Beiser’s Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 (Oxford, 2016) is the first sustained reconstruction since the nineteenth century of the German pessimism controversy itself — Schopenhauer’s challenge, the systems of Mainländer, von Hartmann, and Bahnsen, and the answers of Dühring and the neo-Kantians — and it makes the case that the dispute, far from a curiosity, turned German philosophy decisively toward the question of the value of life (PhilPapers record; a detailed assessment appears in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews).

The primary texts begin with Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and the Parerga und Paralipomena, where the essay “On the Sufferings of the World” states the case most directly; the editions of E.F.J. Payne remain the standard English. For the sources Schopenhauer himself read as confirmation, the library hosts F. Max Müller’s translations in the Sacred Books of the East — the Upanishads and the Dhammapada — the same Victorian channel through which much of the Indian material reached the European nineteenth century, to be read with the caution that the pessimist reception is one reading of those texts and not their tradition-internal sense. Of the heirs, von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten and Mainländer’s Die Philosophie der Erlösung survive chiefly in German; Leopardi’s Zibaldone and Cioran’s aphorisms have full modern English editions. The etymology of the term records its late and deliberate coinage against the optimism it was made to refuse.

What the pessimist asks of a reader is finally a single discipline: to keep the two questions apart — how one feels about being alive, and whether being alive, weighed without flattery, comes out ahead. Schopenhauer’s wager was that the honest weighing yields a loss, and that the only response equal to the loss is to stop adding to it: to quiet the will rather than feed it, to refuse the consolations of progress and the promised better world, and to meet the structure of wanting with something between resignation and a hard-won pity for everything else that wants. The mood may be borne lightly or darkly; the verdict is meant to hold regardless. That is the wager the tradition makes, and it makes it not as a complaint about the times but as an account of the form of a life — the pendulum between craving and its emptiness, ground down to the same balance in the beggar and the king.

→ In the library: The Dhammapada (Müller, 1881) · The Upanishads (Müller, 1884)

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