Category: Thought

Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea

Certain friends were rather sceptical of me reading this book. I myself am not a serious tea-drinker. My beverage of choice is water. I do not drink coffee and can’t stand alcohol either. At their most exotic my tastes generally reach only as far as hot chocolate and apple juice. But when I was in Moscow at the beginning of this year, I did spend a little time drinking tea. I even, with what proved atrocious timing, bought an expensive tea set from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in Saint Petersburg the day before Russia invaded Ukraine.

I do not like the taste of tea that much, though it does provide a little variety. What I do like, however, is the ritual surrounding it. Kettle on, teabag in, steep, remove the bag, wait for the temperature to become bearable, and then finally drink. To this list, we might add various intermediary stages – hot water to the teapot, teapot to teacup, the ubiquitous milk and sugar. There is something (comforting? Or homely?) about drinking tea that seems to suggest that life is good. It is a stabilising act. You can’t successfully make tea while running or in a rush. You have to be calm and have a little time on your hands. It both requires stability and order, and plays its part in creating them. I look forward to the next time I will feel at ease enough to want to brew myself a cuppa.

By comparison with me and my little ritual of kettle-to-cup, the ceremonies described in Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea are elaborate pageantry. But I did not read The Book of Tea to learn about tea, so I was not upset to find that the book, which is really a long essay broken into short chapters, does not have that much to do with tea. Instead, it is about the meaning of tea drinking and its connection with Eastern philosophy. Written in English, its goal is at least partly to illumine us westerners’ ideas of Japan and its culture, and it does this by connecting the culture to the sources and ideas that inspire it. In my case, specifically, I was inspired to read Okakura’s book by its connection with Heidegger, who was given a copy in 1919. Some philosophers, such as Tomonobu Imamichi, say he was inspired to create one of his key concepts, that of “being-in-the-worldness” after he read it.  

My fancy tea set, now stranded in a dacha outside of Saint Petersburg with the rest of my things.

The Book of Tea is broken up into seven sections, each of which deals with a different aspect of tea and culture. Some of these were more relevant to my search than others. Things like section II, “The Schools of Tea”, a look at the curious history of tea drinking in East Asia, in particular in how its preparation differed in different periods and places, and why that was so; section IV, on the tea room itself, and the architectural principles lying behind it; and finally, section VI, about flowers and what our treatment of them says about us and our cultures, were all interesting but not necessarily as philosophically dense as the third section, dealing with “Taoism and Zennism”.

Less philosophically dense, less explicit on that topic, but not devoid of philosophy either. If “Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence”, then every attention given to that beauty within these pages has a part to play. Okakura describes his little philosophy as “essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.” The ritual of tea drinking is not a mere mechanical process for him, but rather seems to contain an image of life that we would do well to absorb into ourselves –

“It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.”

It is a ritual that elevates simplicity above tacky grandeur, that beatifies it. The austerely adorned tea rooms of Japan are not empty because of poverty, but because of love and respect for what they do contain. A single painting or flower, together with the tea itself, can do more to summon an atmosphere and create a mood, than an entire forest of bric-a-brac can. Okakura notes in connection with this the obvious but memorable fact that “one cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time.” In short, unity of effect, or that oft-repeated word, harmony, is more important than merely proving one’s power and riches, intentionally or not, by a clutter of shiny objects.

The thing that The Book of Tea does best, I think, is serve as a bridge between cultures. Okakura’s English is every bit as harmonic and beautiful as the tea scenes he describes, and he brings many new thinkers and characters into our world as we read. No matter how philosophical he is waxing, he is always willing to use traditional stories and anecdotes to make his points. My favourite of these concerns Rikiu, a legendary tea-master, and his son. One day he asked his son to clean to the way to the tea house. Shoan, the son, swept the path and tidied everything up. Despite this, Rikiu said he had not done the job properly, so Shoan returned to his task. Eventually, he said to his father that he could clean no further, that the whole thing was spotless. But his father shook his head and walked to the nearest tree and shook it, scattering over the garden path its red and gold leaves. Cleanliness is one thing, but the master’s goals were always beyond it, in the creation of a full and perfect impression.

“Teaism” grew out of Taoism and Zennism, two of the major Eastern traditions. Taoism has been called the “art of being in the world” (Heidegger no doubt spat out his own tea at this point) by some Chinese historians, Okakura informs us. Taoism’s key message in Okakura’s reading lies in adaptability, “a constant readjustment to our surroundings”. A readiness for change led practically to an emphasis on hesitancy and care when going about our lives, a sort of reverence arising through respect for the malleability of life and things. The second part of the puzzle is Zennism, whose key contribution is “its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual.” In reorientating ourselves towards the everyday, and making us treat it seriously, we have the philosophical foundations necessary to drink tea as a Tea-ist. “Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.”

I myself have not had a proper Eastern philosophy “phase”. At school, the furthest I got was downloading the Tao-Te-Ching on my Kindle, and then never getting around to reading it. At various times I have tried meditating but never got very far with that either. As for a literary approach, both my Schopenhauer and my Siddhartha (the Hesse novel, which apparently isn’t a fantastic representation of Buddhism, anyway) are stuck in Russia for the time being, alongside the tea set I mentioned earlier. As I have not had such a phase, I was very much treading new ground reading The Book of Tea, and have no way of telling how well it represents its themes.

Yet who needs all that to know that this is a book presenting some sensible ideas? Especially today, when much of the world’s problems seem connected to our having too much stuff and thinking we need more, The Book of Tea emphasises the way that reality can be transfigured if we only alter our attitude towards it a little bit. “When we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.”

In all this, Teaism fits nicely into the world of Wendell Berry, and indeed of other environmental thinkers with their emphasis on the local and the small instead of the boundless and consumptive. In a single room, with a single cup, there can be more fodder for the imagination than in the greatest houses of the world. Whether or not we choose to make this the guiding principle of our lives, it still has much to offer us. Because anything that teaches us reverence and to find beauty in the everyday can never teach us that truth often enough.

Karl Jaspers on War Guilt

I haven’t quite decided whether I like what I read being relevant to understanding the world around me, or whether that relevance is ultimately more disturbing than positive. At university, I read Theodor Adorno’s essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” and then later on various things of Hannah Arendt’s, such as “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility” – both works that aimed to analyse the state of the German body politic in the aftermath of the Second World War. These were interesting enough and helped me write essays, but they were not ultimately texts that I thought would have much use in my day-to-day life. Nietzsche might turn me into a superman, but Adorno and Arendt would at best only teach me to look at history with care and scepticism. Now, however, it seems that I was completely mistaken.

Since the events of February 24th, I have returned to these pieces in an attempt to understand some of the questions that the present conflict will raise within Russia if it is ever to return to the Western international community as anything other than a pariah. After the Second World War Germany lay in ruins and the Allies had to work out what to do with the Germans themselves. Some of them, of course, had perpetrated perhaps the greatest mass evil the world had yet witnessed; others, however, had merely stood by; and still, others had actively or passively resisted the Nazi regime. But as Arendt points out, the only way to be sure that someone actually was an anti-Nazi was after they had hanged them. The Allies ultimately decided not to blame the German people as a whole; instead, they organised the Nuremberg Trials for Germans who were most obviously guilty of terrible crimes.

The situation in Russia will not be similar to that of Germany after 1945 and hopefully Ukraine will also escape a similar fate. But there is much that needs unpacking, challenging, and working through if we ourselves are to be able to engage constructively with Russia and the Russians. Because in adopting an attitude of blanket condemnation of the Russian people, we not only copy the Russian state’s own idiotic stance that suggests Ukraine is composed entirely of banderovtsi (supporters of the Ukrainian Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera), we also lose the sense of nuance and humanity that is necessary for living successfully on this shared planet.

Anyway, in preparation for a much longer piece I have read Karl Jaspers’ lecture series The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage). Like Arendt’s “Organised Guilt”, Jaspers’ lectures were given as the smoke was still rising off a ruined Germany. Jaspers, not a Jew himself but married to one, was concerned with identifying what his people were guilty of and who should be their judges. In this post I will summarise his work. Translations are my own.

Among the ashes

Germany’s manufacturing capacity had been burnt to the ground, but there was still greater damage inside men and women’s hearts. People had lost common ground, there was no way to communicate anymore. More than that, people had lost the ability to reflect. The Question of German Guilt takes us back to the Enlightenment and in particular Kant’s view of intellectual maturity as stated in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”. Germans, Jaspers thought, needed to regain their maturity – here defined as the ability to think for themselves (what Kant used the Latin phrase “sapere aude” – “dare to think” – to mean).  No longer should Germans hide behind “pride, doubt, anger, defiance, revenge, scorn” – instead they should listen and think, having set their emotions “on ice”.

It is only through rebuilding the ability for Germans to talk to one another that they will be able to connect to one another again. And then, once that has been achieved, “we create the essential foundations for us to talk to other peoples once more.” The only way out of pariahdom is to return to communication within one’s own broken state. But twelve years of propaganda and ideological pressure had done much to destroy internal unity among the Germans and deprive them of their solid ground.

Four Types of Guilts

The world (eventually) condemned the Nazi state, and rightly so. People wanted things to be made right and the Germans to be punished. But Jaspers is keen to demarcate the areas where the rest of the world was right to attack Germany, and where it ought better to keep silent. To this end, he defines four separate types of guilt.

Criminal Guilt

The first of these is criminal guilt. This one is familiar to us all. A crime has been committed when a law has been broken, and punishment is exacted through the court. One punished in this way has the opportunity to defend themselves using defined measures, like a defence lawyer.

Political Guilt

The second type of guilt is political guilt or political accountability. The things a state does, whether good or bad, concern political guilt. Every citizen is politically guilty because every citizen is responsible for their state. The Germans did not, strictly speaking, vote as a majority for Hitler, but they were still guilty for his actions because they did not act to remove him from power. The actions undertaken by Nazi Germany are, therefore, in this limited way, the fault of the German people. Instead of a court, here the arena for judgement is determined by power, or “the will of the victors”. The Allies and Soviets had won and gained control over Germany, so it was entirely fair for them to determine a punishment that would work out this political guilt. Whether they wanted to restrain themselves or murder as many Germans as possible, this was up to them.

Political guilt grows out of minor failures, especially to resist harmful political tendencies. Eventually, it became next to impossible to resist the Nazis. But there were many opportunities, especially early on in Hitler’s tenure, when the Germans could have prevented him from consolidating his control. Even if we feel useless and unfree, that is the eventual result of situations where we could have acted to prevent ourselves from becoming so.  

Moral Guilt

Next, we have moral guilt. The actions taken by individual people, whether or not they break laws, are still things the individuals are responsible for. With moral guilt, there is no way to pass the responsibility on to others. Being ordered to do something is no excuse, nor is being scared. If we pull the trigger in a war, we are not always guilty of a crime, but we must make peace with our own soul about our actions. Likewise, if we do not act to prevent something bad, such as the removal of a Jewish friend to the camps, we are not guilty in a criminal sense, but we are guilty in a moral sense. Within our own conscience – the only valid courtroom [MP1] – we must determine how to live with ourselves. Nobody can tell us we are morally guilty, and nobody can punish us for moral guilt. All these mechanisms lie within the individual soul or heart and are nobody else’s business.

A group cannot be morally guilty as a collective. Only individuals can be morally guilty, as their consciences are their own. To generalise a group as guilty for anything other than their political failures is the beginning of hate: “it would be as though there are no more people, only collectives.” When we refer to the people so much it destroys individual dignity and lays the ground for ideologies that destroy the individual within us. 

Metaphysical Guilt

Finally, we have metaphysical guilt. This is where Jaspers’ philosophical leaning becomes most apparent. This kind of guilt is connected to our existence as members of a common humanity. “There is a solidarity between human beings as human beings, which makes every individual responsible for every injustice and harm that takes place in the world, especially for those crimes which are committed in our presence or with our knowledge. When I do not do what I can to stop them, so am I guilty.” This is guilt over human badness, a kind of shame at what we are capable of, and though it is spread over all of us alive, it is worse for those who are close, physically, and temporally, to horrors. It is a kind of survivor’s guilt mixed with shame at what we humans are – “that I still live, that is my guilt”. The only potential judge for such guilt is god.

Consequences, Defences.

Each of these guilts has its consequences. Criminal guilt has punishment, while political guilt has accountability and making amends, whether this be through reparations or being destroyed by the victors. Moral guilt leads to a painful process of renewal, first by insight and then later by atonement. Finally, an awareness of metaphysical guilt leads to “a changed consciousness of humanity’s own self before God.” We learn something about who we are and are left humbled by it.

We must be able to defend ourselves, especially against the accusations of others. In The Question of German Guilt Jaspers’ describes some of the ways in which we might do this. Firstly, we can distinguish between ourselves as an individual and the group our accusers may wish to forcibly merge us into. We can state the facts of the case, and we can appeal to rights (providing, however, that we have not broken those of others – hypocrisy is rarely an effective defence!). We can reject the judge as biased, or the accusations themselves as not being used to establish truth or justice but as instead serving some other, less worthy purpose – as punishment themselves, or to discredit us. Ultimately, the main thing to note about the process of public accountability is that we can demand “accountability and punishment,” but we can never demand “regret and rebirth”. The latter can only come from within.

The Germans’ Guilt

After WW2 Germany was covered with foreign soldiers, many of whom were forbidden even from exchanging a friendly word with their former enemy’s people. Meanwhile, placards were going up with the phrase “Das ist eure Schuld!” (this is your fault) next to scenes from the camps. It was not an easy time to be a German, even without the refugee crisis that the dislocation of the Germans from their homelands in Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and others had caused. But the phrase “this is your fault” is not as clear as it appears. It can mean “You tolerated the regime”, “You supported it”, “you stood by before evil,” “you committed criminal acts”, and “as a people you are lesser, criminal, and bad.” In short, it can mean an awful lot. So, what should it mean? What guilt was there, according to Jaspers, and were there any mitigating factors?

The Nuremberg Trials determined criminal guilt, trying Germans who had committed clear crimes against humanity and war crimes. By determining criminal guilt, the other forms of guilt were brought into sharper focus. All the Germans were politically guilty because they had failed to make their government accountable. “But making someone accountable is not the same thing as recognising them as morally guilty.” So, it is in matters of moral guilt that there are distinctions to be drawn among the Germans. Some people of course do not have a conscience, but for the majority, there would be varying degrees of moral guilt and a consequence need for reflection, atonement, and renewal.

Jaspers notes the different ways that moral guilt can manifest itself, ranging from false consciousness, partial approval of the state (weren’t the autobahns great?), to delusions including self-deception (thinking you can change it from within). The only way of lessening one’s moral guilt as a German would be to have acted to prevent injustices and doing things like sabotage.  

Mitigating Factors

The problem with political guilt in particular is that we can never completely nail it down. We all know how the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War left Germany in a position where fascism could develop effectively – here the victors of that war must bear some guilt for the eventual “round two”. But there was also inaction after Hitler had risen to power. Jaspers notes as examples the Vatican’s concordat with Hitler in 1933, international recognition of Nazi Germany, and the decision to let the Olympic Games go ahead there. We Europeans were also guilty of inaction, preferring an uneasy peace to a war that could have saved us all from still greater horrors. These factors do not change the fact that Germany needed to be held accountable in 1945, but they do make it clearer that Germany’s guilt was not absolute.

Purification – Living With Guilt

The last parts of The Question of German Guilt are concerned with living with our moral guilt. Unlike criminal guilt, which ends when a sentence is served or a fine paid, or political guilt which is bounded by a peace treaty and thereby ended, moral guilt lasts forever. “It never ends. Whoever bears [such guilt] within themselves begins a trial that lasts a lifetime.” Someone who is morally guilty wishes to make amends, but they cannot be demanded of such a person, and they must again rely on their conscience to determine what is necessary to set things right. But things must be set right, because moral purification “is the way human beings are human beings”. Once we are conscious of our guilt, we can feel again a human solidarity and common responsibility, without which freedom is impossible.

Conclusion

Jaspers was not the only person trying to work out what to do about the fact that his people had committed crimes of a hitherto unprecedented evil, and his thoughts in The Question of German Guilt are not necessarily the best approach. Yet I can’t help but feel that they will prove a good starting point for considering Russian guilt, when that time comes. Russian citizens have had ample time to vote their president out of office, and then to remove him from power by other means – that they have failed is their common political guilt. Meanwhile on the battlefield, in Mariupol and Bucha and countless other cities and towns, crimes have been committed which must be tried in a court of law. Some of them, indeed, already have been.

But I am more interested in matters of moral guilt. It seems to me correct that the Russians have very different levels of moral guilt, ranging from inaction to active opposition to grudging support for their state. Thinking about the Russian people as collectively morally guilty is idiotic and counterproductive – indeed, more than one of the (recent, academic) essays I have read on this kind of guilt says that the only way for an awareness of moral guilt to grow within a group is from within that group. If an outsider like me or you tries to tell the Russians they are guilty it will almost always have the opposite effect. Therefore, we should be silent on the accusations if we care about the state of others’ souls, however much we might desire retribution for crimes committed in their name. The only exception Jaspers makes is that of friends – others who are close to us and who we acknowledge to have a genuine interest in our souls.

I have not written this piece to defend Russians. Certain of my friends sharing memes about how their conscience is killing them does nothing to diminish their obvious and, often, continued failure to act. But we must realise that guilt is a complex thing, and once the last gun goes silent there will be things that we can demand from the losing side of this conflict, and things that we cannot. And unfortunately, matters of conscience will always be beyond our reach.

Ultimately I am not quite sure how far I agree with Jaspers. I hope anyone who, like me, has been thinking about guilt these past few months will appreciate just how much of a quagmire the whole topic is. If you have an interesting take on how to work out guilt and responsibility in this or any other conflict, consider leaving a comment.

Mara van der Lugt’s Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering

The words “pessimism” and “depression” are not, in fact, the same. They share some things – like the double “s” in the middle – but not everything. Philosophical pessimism is still more different from depression than its everyday own-brand pessimistic cousin, the one that we normally talk about when we use the word. Mara van der Lugt’s book, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering, provides a fascinating exploration of the origins of philosophical pessimism and its development throughout the early modern period, ending with Schopenhauer himself. She shows that serious engagement with pessimism and earthly suffering was born out of a seriousengagement with theodicy – the discipline of trying to work out how a perfectly powerful, good, and knowledgeable God could create such a miserable sod as yours truly.

Ranging through optimists as well as pessimists, she shows how the latter especially are driven by “a deep and widely shared concern over how to speak truthfully, meaningfully, and compassionately about human (and sometimes even animal suffering)”. Where the two groups differ fundamentally is in their perspective, with the optimists adopting a “cosmic” or large-scale perspective, and the pessimists adopting a microscopic but not unimportant one that is the human heart – the “creaturely” point of view.

For van der Lugt, pessimism is not fundamentally a question about the future – whether things will get better, or whether we have no reason to believe that will be the case. She argues compellingly that such questions of the future arose out of considering the present, which she calls “value pessimism” to distinguish it from “future orientated” pessimism. This type of pessimism is not about deciding whether life is worth living, but about weighing it up – are we faced with more unhappiness than happiness in our time upon the earth?

Throughout, she demonstrates that pessimism “does not want to be a philosophy of despair”, and certainly needn’t be. Instead, she argues that it is capable at its best of giving “due weight to the suffering of others” in a way that optimism rarely does. “At its best, it is a philosophy of fragility, sensitivity, compassion, and consolation; at its worst, it is callous in its own way and ruins us for joy by telling us that it is impossible.” Although the thinkers we read about stretch from Pierre Bayle in the 17th century to Schopenhauer in the 19th, the philosophy that emerges is one that is strikingly modern in its attitudes and wholly relevant in its approach.

I cannot pretend to summarise wholly van der Lugt’s book. Nor would I want to, for it really is entertaining and well written. Nor could I, because there is a chapter on Kant that went down in my brain about as well as the last time I attempted to read him. But I will share what I found interesting.

Questions of pessimism grew out of the problem of evil. The classic formulation by Epicurus is as follows: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is God able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?

Here we are, we God-fearers, perplexed. At least many people have been, for many hundreds of years. Originally, the major issue was “natural” or “physical” evils. The Earthquake of Lisbon in the 18th century killed a great many people and could not really be explained in any satisfying way. Individual suffering was easier to deal with. Augustine divided the world’s ills into sin and the punishment for it. Any pain we suffered was the punishment for something or other. This too didn’t always leave people feeling satisfied, as far as explanations go. And in fact, his dictum that “under a just God no one can be miserable unless they deserve to be” seems these days rather to provide an argument that God was unjust – not what the old saint had in mind.

Individual suffering is a problem though, and van der Lugt’s book traces the intricacies of explanations and counter explanations for what the significance and meaning of that suffering might be. Pierre Bayle, for example, was the first thinker to consider mental suffering as just as important as bodily suffering. Voltaire, Hume, and Rousseau are the major names, although there are some lesser-known ones too, such as William Warburton and Malebranche. As the years go by we see God retreat, and various methods attempt to weigh good and evil on the scales.

Perhaps the most interesting trend is the expansion of the idea of what evil is, or at least of what kind of suffering is problematic. Two points stand out. The first is the suffering of animals, which Schopenhauer famously cared about. The second is the appreciation for the way that your disposition (or, today, brain chemistry) may leave you inclined towards suffering, no matter how good your life may be on paper. Whereas once it was just harm, like being hurt physically, and then it was mental hurt, now even the increased capacity for mental hurt becomes a problem for a just and kind God.

Though Schopenhauer makes a good go of it, arguments for pessimism tend not to be hugely rigorous – they go from personal experience backwards, no matter how many times we may toss around such highfaluting language as the “will” and its striving. Too often is it the case that an argument can simply be dispelled by saying “but you are looking at this wrong”. A friend comes to you and says the world is dark and evil; you tell him to go outside and smell the wet grass and all will be well. Neither of you is wrong. Everyone’s intuitions as to the world’s deeper state come from the soul, and it is locked to others, perhaps keylessly. Compendiums of suffering can only confirm what we already think. Horror shocks, but it rarely convinces. We can always withdraw to our own perspective and disarm it if that is our inclination.

Perhaps that is why the best arguments for pessimism are unsystematic, unphilosophical even – they are literary, artistic. We cannot trust that we see the same real world as everyone else. This goes for its essential goodness just as much as it goes for what colour green actually is. But with a work of art, its creator has much more scope to control the perspective we are given upon the “world”. We cannot draw back and approach matters differently because our access to them comes only one word at a time, from a fixed view. Some of us spend the most blessed days of our lives interpreting art, but these interpretations are limited by the material. We can argue that the raw beauty of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction is redemptive, but we cannot argue that his work is optimistic or cheery.

Fiction pessimism, as with any argument about the world, suffocates alternate impulses so that as we collapse on our beds, the book tumbling out of our hands, we realise the only valid way of looking at things. (Bakhtin would argue that there are certain kaleidoscopic authorial exceptions, but even he would agree with me that they are the exceptions to the rule). Luckily, the world disproves the argument soon enough once we get back to it. We always return to whatever we want to see, to our own perspective. But because the best arguments for pessimism in philosophy still tend to be based on appeals to experience, we may as well go for that approach which seems to be best at transferring experience to its full intensity. Which, we may hate to admit it, probably isn’t a monograph.  

There are very few books on pessimism being published in the academic world. As a philosophy, it suffers from an overreliance on what we see and experience for ourselves and the conclusions we draw as individuals. The only other book I have come across was Joshua Foa Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, published in 2006. Funnily enough, Dienstag’s book and van der Lugt’s have very little overlap in thinkers, with Dienstag’s focus being on later writers like Unamuno, Nietzsche, Freud and Cioran. Moreover, amusingly, they both disagree about Rousseau – with Dienstag calling him the founder of pessimism, and van der Lugt calling him an optimist! Both of them agree, however, that pessimism can be a source of strength. I recall from my own, alas, all-too-brief study of Schopenhauer how much beauty, consolation, and compassion I found in his work.

And actually, the comparative absence of attention being paid to this topic and some of these thinkers is itself, in a way, a good thing. Discovery is always tainted by the feeling you are stepping onto a terra that is very much cognita. Whereas when we sense that we are striking out alone, there is a truly wonderful intimacy – allow me to link to my translation of Baratinsky’s short poem on the topic. (Speaking of which, Baratinsky is often compared to the great Italian poet-pessimist Leopardi, for those of you interested in exploring pessimism’s poetic and literary manifestations further). This intimacy is important because it loosens the nuts of the soul and makes us more receptive, and receptivity is precisely what we need for arguments that encourage us to be more compassionate.

Vander Lugt finishes her book with a short but wonderful chapter considering the potential value of pessimism now. Its approach to compassion, to seeing everyone upon the world as suffering in some sense, broadens our horizons in a way that is not constrained by earthly concerns such as culture, race, or the other identifiers. This care-driven approach is also relevant when we regard the suffering of animals as important, which Schopenhauer did, and the suffering of future generations. In this sense, pessimism is anti-individualistic and conservative in the best of ways.

Van der Lugt also brings up our culture’s occasionally mindless promotion of mindfulness as one area where pessimism can provide an alternative view of things. If we say that happiness is up to us, we are also saying that our unhappiness is up to us. This “overburdening of the will” leaves us feeling guilty when we aren’t happy, which only makes us more miserable. The pessimist view that some of us are simply not lucky with our constitutions and unable to be as happy as the rest says that we aren’t fully to blame for being unhappy and shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it. This is more likely to be what a sad person wants to hear than that it’s their fault they’re miserable.

And speaking of which, if it’s up to us to sort out our happiness, why should we care about others who suffer to begin with? After all, they are failing to make the right choices, to be mindful and meditate for ten minutes before breakfast or what-have-you. Thus mindfulness, rather than being a positive happy-making approach, can sometimes distance us from others and make us still more depressed. At least when it’s not mediated by an awareness that some problems are not always in our heads, and that sometimes sadness is a legitimate response to the things life throws at us. But sadness, we probably should agree, cannot be a mode of life. We need tools to return to the world, and serious pessimism of the sort van der Lugt describes can be just as effective as in this as mindfulness, and indeed can successfully coexist alongside it.

This all seems to me to be reasonable. As always seems to happen, the truth seems rather boringly to be one of compromise. We are partly responsible for our happiness, but not entirely. This world is full of misery, but not entirely. We must be more caring – this alone is always true. Still, pessimism, and by extension van der Lugt’s book, is valuable precisely because it provides a counterweight to the more optimistic approach that is culturally dominant among us. That her writing is lucid and a pleasure to read is a bonus for which we should all be grateful.