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.