Tag: Schopenhauer

Wittgenstein’s Vienna and the Approach to his Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born British philosopher, “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating” (Bertrand Russell), was a master logician who studied under Frege and Russell before, like any great apprentice, overcoming them in one fell linguistic swoop with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

In that work he put to bed all the codswallop about metaphysics and morals, ethics and eschatology, which had bedevilled philosophy for centuries, nay, millennia, with his canonical “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and his dismissal of all the above as nonsense. Wittgenstein was a knife that cut away all the gristle. All that mattered was logic, cold and hard.

But is that what he was really about? Is that what the Tractatus was really about?

This slender book, first published in 1921 and now out of copyright, has started recently reappearing in a flurry of new translations in English, one of which has prompted me to write to you today. But much more than the book, the main subject is the approach to the book. Is it really, with its crystalline numbered tree structure, a structured work of logic alone, or is there reason to think there is more to it?

The introduction to my edition, and what it passes over

I first wrote about Wittgenstein the man after reading Ray Monk’s biography, but could not make my way through any of his actual works. It was all too alien to me. Now I have finally gone through the Tractatus in the new OUP translation made by Michael Beaney, who to judge from his various distinguished positions is extremely successful in his field of study. In fact, the book is more introduction than Wittgenstein, with a long traditional introduction and then a long note on the text, explaining the publication history of the work, and finally the seventy pages of the Tractatus itself, followed by an annex with simplified “tree-structure” of the propositions, notes and glossary.

Beaney talks a lot about logic and the influence on Wittgenstein of Russell and Frege, two titans of funny letters and mathematical squiggles. He mentions contemporary scientists Boltzmann and Hertz and the philosopher Schopenhauer as other influences, whilst giving an indication of in what this influence consisted, at least in his opinion. But there is something funny in this, even to one little versed in philosophy. Schopenhauer, for example, this arch pessimist, is reduced to a reaction to Kant and his understanding of sensory and rational experience. Pessimism, in Beaney’s reading of influence, or the ethics which followed on from Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, does not get a look in.

This is the first hint of dissatisfaction, but there is more to come. The account of the sixth section of the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein wrote after the experience front line action in the First World War, is merely the part that “gave Wittgenstein the most trouble.” The trouble, however, is logical for Beaney. The statements on ethics and the meaning of life and human happiness, are given a single paragraph in his account. They do not appear to be important, more aberrations to be passed over in relative silence.

Yet is this man just a genius of logic?

Bertrand Russell, finally meeting Wittgenstein after the war where he had fought bravely before ending up in Italian prisoner-of-war camp, wrote home to complain of him: “He has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and [German mystic religious writer] Angelus Silesius, he seriously contemplates becoming a monk.” The remark is quoted by Beaney, but only in the context of Wittgenstein’s attempts to get the Tractatus published. Another famous letter, to Ludwig von Ficker, a publisher, is also introduced in a way that suggests we must assume it is of no importance at all to understanding the book:

“it will probably be a help to you if I write a few words about my book. You see, I am quite sure that you won’t get all that much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; it’s subject matter will seem quite alien to you. But it isn’t really alien to you, because the book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits”

During the war, Wittgenstein carried around a copy of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he said “saved” his life. His fellow soldiers even took to calling him “the man with the Gospels.” He disliked Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus, which was necessary for the work to be published in English, saying that Russell had misunderstood him. This misunderstanding seemed only to increase with time. Russell thought the later Wittgenstein had squandered his talents completely.

Other things about Wittgenstein’s behaviour seem odd. I remember from Monk’s biography how Wittgenstein would go into Russell’s chambers at Cambridge late at night and pace around, saying that he would kill himself once he left, thinking and pacing for hours at a time until he resolved whatever was bothering him. And when he met the men who became the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, he shocked them by reading them poetry and recommending someone as “illogical” as Heidegger. In short, Wittgenstein himself, in his living, seemed anything but a merely logical genius. He seemed animated by another force. And if the man was animated by another force, is it not likely that his first work was animated by another force too? 

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

I bought this book, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, back when I first thought I would read Wittgenstein. It has proven the work which has most helped me to engage with the Tractatus, far more than Beaney’s introduction or any other which I have read, which is funny given that the Tractatus is scarcely quoted here, and Wittgenstein is part of the shadows, certainly not the main act like the title might imply. But the arguments in the work are convincing. Wittgenstein, as part of his journey to the Tractatus, contacted the eminent philosophers Frege and Russell. But why did he do this? Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein was already engaged with some problems – for why else would he reach out? And that after meeting the logicians, he was given a set of tools that let him resolve them. But logic was never the main thing. It was just the means to another end.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna is an attempt, circumstantially we might say, to consider what these problems were. Vienna was an extraordinary place in the early 1900s, with Freud and Schoenberg and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, to name just a few of the leading literary and cultural lights. To their number Janik and Toulmin add others of whom I was less aware, like the architect Adolf Loos, and most importantly to their argument, the firebrand writer Karl Kraus. Through depicting the state of intellectual upheaval in Vienna at this time, and all its components, they lead us to see that the Tractatus was not a link in a logical chain, but rather a response to a problem that was at the time particularly Viennese.

They have, perhaps, some good reason for this. Professor von Wright, Wittgenstein’s literary executor, said to them that the two most important facts about Wittgenstein were that he was Viennese, and that he was an engineer with a thorough knowledge of physics. Both of these flow into Janik and Toulmin’s analysis, and both lead to a very different picture of the Tractatus to the one we might be used to.

Context: The Proving Ground for World Destruction

It was the Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, who called the city the “Proving Ground for World Destruction”. And it is he who looms large as one of the central influences on the milieu that a young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in. Vienna, towards the end of the Habsburg Empire, was a place that produced some of the most brilliant art and philosophy that we have – and for its time, some of the most experimental, most modernist. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, are just some of these names which have in one way or another made their mark on culture, and often been featured here on the blog. But as so often happens with great art, much of that was produced in response to its environment, rather than thanks to it, as the hostile forces artists experienced in their daily lives were rejected and transformed in works of art.

Vienna at this time was a place where the gulf between appearance and reality was as great as it has perhaps ever been anywhere. The “City of Dreams” shone with palaces and parks, it seethed with its rapidly growing population – it quadrupled in size over about fifty years, without growing its city limits nearly so much – and its multinational, multiethnic population, led by a benevolent sovereign, lived according to the great values of that land: reason, order, disciplined conformity to good taste. Some families had done well, like the Wittgensteins, who through canny business decisions had risen to become some of the richest people in Europe. But many more people found themselves trapped in accommodation far too small for them, unable to feed themselves on puny wages.

Ethnic harmony was a lie that was increasingly hard to paper over, and antisemitism was shifting from an unfortunately common personal conviction to a political programme. The lights that the city shone with were not often electric, because the Emperor Franz Joseph plugged any hole that modernity might seep through, keeping the toilets in the palaces without modern plumbing, and the lights running on gas. Like the Russian Empire at that time, society was rigid to the extreme and taboos were rigorously enforced. It seems no surprise that Freud should have his first successes here, working with women who felt things they were not allowed to feel, and had no way of managing those feelings. For a literary response to female sexuality, we need look no further than Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, one of my favourite works of the period.

What was said and what wasn’t, what was unimportant and what was, were completely out of order. If in people’s personal lives this led to the rise of psychoanalysis and associated topics – Alfred Adler discovered the “inferiority complex” while in Vienna – in the arts this led to what we might call a crisis of representation. Perhaps this was most obvious in the case of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, some of whose poetry I’ve previously translated here. The enfant terrible of Austrian letters suddenly discovered, after a few years of effortless brilliant poems, that he had “lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently”. This much he wrote in his fictional Letter of Lord Chandos, where he talks about words failing him. It is not that he cannot write, it is that words cannot express what he wishes they could. In short, he can only write – now in prose – of his inability to write and other things. But not of what is higher.

This inability or unwillingness to express things was not just the case with Hofmannsthal. In architecture, Adolf Loos created buildings that were extremely stripped down, with a huge shift away from ornamentation. Schoenberg in music was doing something similar, as were the first non-representational, abstract painters. All of them took inspiration from Kraus, who had a strong sense of mission and morality. In his works he was constantly taking to task politicians and intellectuals for using language badly, often by simply repeating their words back to them. One of the pranks he used to play was sending in fictitious letters to newspapers, claiming to be an expert in a given field (e.g. metallurgy) and watching as they included his deliberate fantasy, without daring to challenge it.

Kraus saw a person’s language as reflecting her morality. In other words, he adopted a holistic view of a human being, where everything can and must be judged together. We can see this in an aphorism of his: “Worthy opinions are valueless; it depends on whose opinions they are.” Kraus was well aware of the emptiness – or in some sense, performativeness – of many of the words and speeches his contemporaries made out of social decorum. His ideal, meanwhile, was a kind of authenticity, where action and speech and person were united. In this he reflected a growing interest in the works of Kierkegaard, and the intellectual dominance of Schopenhauer during this time.

Just as Tolstoy discovered Schopenhauer when writing Anna Karenina, leading him to see the world as full of frustrated desires we had little control over, so too did the Viennese around the turn of the century, where the philosopher was massively in vogue. In his rejection of the external world as controlled by will, and his emphasis on internality, he appealed to intellectuals who found Vienna more fake than real. He was joined by Kierkegaard, who also re-emerged out of obscurity in an environment where authenticity appeared to people like Kraus as the overriding ethical impulse, society be damned.

This crisis of representation and being in the world was not just limited to the arts. In the sciences and philosophy, people like Hertz, Boltzmann, and Mach were also considering questions about what could or should be said and shown. Take this statement of Hertz’s: “When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” He had been discussing the idea of “force”, which seems harder to pin down the more you think about it. But the conclusion he came to was remarkably similar to the one Wittgenstein himself had to the problems of life – the solution is not the answer to the question, but the end of the questioning:

6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.

               (Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)

The young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in the heart of this culture. As one of the richest families in Austria, his home was filled with artists and cultural figures – as was only proper. Many of his siblings had great artistic talents, especially musically. There were also several suicides among his brothers, and as noted above Ludwig regularly spoke of such an end for himself. He hoped to become an aeronautical engineer, first studying in Manchester before being overtaken by philosophy. This led him to Frege, and thence to Bertrand Russell. Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein turned to them because he was already vexed by questions of representation that he naturally encountered, growing up in Vienna, about what could and couldn’t be said and how to think about ethics, and thought logic might help him sort all of this out. Logic was merely a means to solve that all-important (for some) question – how should I live?

The Evidence Does Not Quite Add Up

The evidence for Janik and Toulmin’s view is, they readily acknowledge, circumstantial. Their book, far better than I could, explores the way this crisis penetrated every aspect of Viennese society, so that Wittgenstein simply could not have avoided it. At the same time, we know how the Tractatus was actually written, and the chronology seems wrong. Wittgenstein’s interest in ethics and mysticism seems, or at least the point where it becomes part of the Tractatus, to have come from his experience fighting in the first World War.

Wittgenstein was already odd – for example, he had a superstitious idea that he was soon to die. But it seems that the focus on ethics and God came a little later, when death and he became closely acquainted. “What do I know of God and the purpose of my life?” He wrote in his diary, after the beginning of a particularly brutal offensive on the Eastern Front. It was then that he wrote much of the sixth section of the Tractatus, where he discusses ethics and meaning and what cannot ultimately be spoken. With that said, Russell, meeting Wittgenstein after the war for the first time and finding him a complete “mystic”, also blames William James and Wittgenstein’s experience living and working alone in Norway just before the war.

Conclusion

Yet all this is not particularly important, either way. Wittgenstein’s Vienna cannot conclusively prove that Wittgenstein was concerned with questions about the sayable and authenticity before he met Russell and Frege, but it can certainly show that these were the questions he would not have been able to avoid as a young man surrounded by the culture of his native city. It seems obvious to me, based on my knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life and the genesis of the Tractatus, that these questions of ethics and representability certainly became important to him, probably more important than the rest of the book. And they are what is most important to me, reading the book now.

One slightly mean aside in the book which I nevertheless find myself nodding to, is the suggestion that we in the UK and US undoubtedly understood Wittgenstein very poorly. The cultural shock of this man who was concerned with ethics and life with a passion that in Britain we have rarely allowed ourselves to experience, meant that we almost certainly corralled him into appearing as a figure he was not in reality. Just as in Russia, in Vienna people were taking seriously problems that we have struggled even to see as problems. And rather than see them as problems, we prefer to dismiss them as ravings and madness. Much to our discredit as human beings and inhabitants of this world.

Having read through the book in English now, I am returning to it in the German original. I expect it will take me a long time to understand the Tractatus properly. But I am not trying to understand the logic; at least that is not my primary goal. Instead, I am trying to understand the soul the work contains, and the fire that inspired it. Still, that seems a more worthy aim than merely running around in circles calling things nonsense and tautologies, thinking I am the cleverest fellow in the room.

The Death of the Black Hen

It was lucky I was at my desk or else I wouldn’t have seen them. Two foxes, big ones, and ahead of them flapping, hurtling, racing, mad as a damaged missile – the white hen. By the time I had unbolted the front door, they had had several seconds to continue their attack unimpeded. I was roaring monstrously, but far too slow to deal any damage – the foxes fled before I lay my hands on them. I chased them as far as the tall grass, but then I had to turn back.

The white hen was in the boiler room, buried in a corner with her back to the door. Perhaps she didn’t want to see her end if it was coming. Or perhaps she retained that childish notion that what she could not see, could not see her either. I picked her up and took her to the hen house, locking her in the enclosure. She was hurt, but less badly than I had thought. Her feathers littered the drive, but her attackers had not drawn blood.

I went to find the black hen.

I went through the garden, up and down the drive, and across the front lawn. I found feathers, a lot of them, on the path by the firepit. I found also the little hollow the foxes had made under the wire fence going into the undergrowth. I followed it, and as I advanced something moved ahead of me, retreated still further into the deep green darkness. But I came across a clearing covered in black feathers and I understood that I had come far too late.

Many of the pessimists whom I wrote about last week asked whether life was a good or a bad thing, all considered. One thought experiment they conducted was to ask who would be willing to live their life through again. The answer, they concluded sadly, was few of us. We may have plenty of pleasures and happiness in our time upon the earth, but when we consider the pains – grief, sorrow, illness – we find that they far outweigh the former in intensity, even if in quantity they may be evenly matched.

The girls

Our hens lived good lives. They had a huge area to roam, customers who did not insist on eggs – for neither myself nor my brother actually like them all that much – and food and water and love and warmth. Last year the smaller of the two black hens died of an illness, leaving us with just the big black one and the white one. And now the white one is all alone.

It’s funny the things that a death like this makes you think of. It’s funny really, that it can get to you at all. But I felt guilt, a lot of it, and still do in my way. Earlier that morning I had heard the hens, and I had thought then that it was simply the triumphant clucking of a successful egg-laying operation. But perhaps that had been a cry for help that I had missed.

When a friend visited, he told how all of his hens let him take them in his arms. Ours were much less affectionate. But still, you knew that they loved us. The white hen always let you stroke her if you insisted. And after the small black hen died the big black hen finally let us stroke her too.

More so than a pet, even, you feel a lot of responsibility for something like a hen. A cat or a dog has no real natural predators, at least in restive rural England. We cannot be at fault if an accident occurs because we have done our best. But with hens, it is a different matter. We could never have let them out, to begin with, we could have guarded them more carefully, and so on. Here, responsibility feels more firmly placed upon our shoulders.

Hens have personalities, you come to realise. Secretly, we’re glad that the white one survived because she is bossy boots and a real character. She is always bothering us. She comes and pecks my shins if her food is even a minute late in coming. She is always the most deranged, the wildest, and for all that the most human of the birds we had.

She survived a fox attack earlier in the year too. That was while I was away in Russia. She spent a week living in a little box on the side in the kitchen, and then went back to her business as normal. I am home alone, and boxes in the kitchen are beyond me, but I have brought her food and water, had various discussions and heart-to-hearts with her, and cleaned out her house. I even made her rice, which I was told is a particular delicacy among hens – and she ate the whole pan’s worth.

She limps now, but after a day spent hiding in the hen house, she now comes out into the larger hen run again and hobbles about. She is laying again and already talks. After the attack I was struck by how quiet she was – the only noise she made was terrible, heavy breathing. Understandable, given the circumstances, but so strange to hear coming from her when she is normally so chatty.

All this is to say that I was struck by how human she was. This is an obvious point, but still worth stating. In the relationship you have with these animals in your care they perhaps remain as animals – loved, but not quite fully human. And here the little hen was like a little child.

But the foxes were human too. This was the thing that shook me: the look in their eyes. There was something human about it, but not in any positive sense. We may, from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox or else cute pictures on the internet, assume that all foxes are rascals with hearts of gold. Like wolves, we may secretly admire them. But these two foxes had a look of hatred, human hatred, in their eyes, mixed with what can only be described as bloodlust. They hated me because I had arrived and driven them off and in doing so had deprived them of their kill. And although I am often annoying, never have I seen that look directed at me. Never have I felt the full force of another’s desire to see hurt come to me, never until then. It is not a feeling I’d like to feel again.

The white hen will recover. She is a fighter, after all. When I was talking about the attack with our gardener, she told me a story about another house she had worked on which also had hens and also was the site of a tragedy. In this place, the hens, about twenty of them, roamed on a field with a pond in the middle. They were rescue hens, taken from battery farms – jittery, nervous, and undersized creatures who have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. But one day two foxes got into their field too, and it was a massacre. Every single hen was slaughtered, all but one. As the others were being ripped and torn apart, she had gone to the pond and flown in. She had gone against her nature out of an instinct for survival that even the battery farms had not extinguished. In a way, it’s inspiring.

Looking particularly like a white onion in this one.

Schopenhauer has a famous example to illustrate the truth of his pessimism. He notes that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain… is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” This is something we instinctively agree with (though as proof of pessimism it probably does not convince us), but I really felt its truth after saving the white hen. The fear, the terror of her eyes – and she had survived. How much more would the black hen have suffered, I can only guess. And all that for a tasty meal that would be forgotten soon enough. A soul extinguished for a full belly. The scales are not in balance, that’s for sure. But then again, neither the eater not the eaten is given much to philosophising. This is just nature at work.

The thought experiment, would you be willing to live your life again, is an old one. Nietzsche turned it around into a positive guide with his da capo (“let’s do it all again”) attitude, saying that the potential for eternally repeating your life should be the guide for how you live it. In the case of pessimists, they answered that we would not wish to live our lives again, and our certainty in this would only grow as we got older. Illness and grief are things the experience of which is simply too great, they argue, to let us want to see the other things. Mara Van der Lugt in her book, however, notes that the experiment uses a kind of sleight-of-hand. If asked whether we wanted to play our lives through exactly as they were, perhaps we would say no. But if we were asked whether we wanted simply to live again, then many more of us would say yes. No matter how well lived, our lives will always lack novelty to one who has already lived them. But a new life, with new pain and new joy, probably tips the scales towards life being something worth experiencing.

But still, would the hens choose to live again? Two or three years of roaming the garden, the drive, the fields, pecking at me and the ground, pestering the gardener and my mother, but ending up being literally ripped limb from limb. Would they choose that?

Our lives are unlikely to end in us being ripped limb from limb. But one thing that has stuck with me after the attack was how unnecessary violence is for us as human beings. We do not need to rely on the suffering of humans and other animals to get our food, our water, our clothing, and our shelter. That we do is simply a reflection of our generally inadequate attempts to build a better world. But still, it must be possible. Whereas for these wild foxes, at least for the moment, a reason not to eat our hens is not going to be forthcoming. All our feathered friends and we, their carers, can do is be extra vigilant.

When I went to see the white hen this most recent time, she was already racing to the door out from her hen run into the world, even with her limp. I have decided that she is no longer a symbol of a willingness to fight to live against the odds. Instead, dear readers, she is simply as thick as beans.

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.