Philosophical pessimism is the view that life or existence has negative value. It is often stated as the claim that life is not worth living, or that non-existence would be preferable to coming into or remaining in existence. Other accounts define it by the claim that suffering and other harms outweigh pleasure and other goods, that happiness is unstable or unattainable, or that existence has no inherent meaning or purpose.
Pessimistic themes appear in several religious and philosophical traditions, including parts of Buddhism, the book of Ecclesiastes, some forms of Gnosticism, and the work of Hegesias of Cyrene. In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer gave pessimism a systematic form in The World as Will and Representation. Later German philosophers, including Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer, developed related systems. In the 20th and 21st centuries, writers including Peter Wessel Zapffe, Emil Cioran, Thomas Ligotti, David Benatar, Julio Cabrera, and Drew Dalton have argued for pessimistic positions using claims from ethics, psychology, metaphysics, and the natural sciences.
Arguments for pessimism often concern the relation between pleasure and suffering; whether later goods can compensate for earlier or simultaneous harms; life as striving, frustration, boredom, and decay; asymmetries between the harms and benefits of coming into existence; the absence of cosmic meaning; and the suffering of non-human animals, including wild animal suffering. Pessimists have proposed different responses to these claims, including renunciation, compassion, political or social reform, antinatalism, voluntary extinction, and positions on suicide and abortion. Critics, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, Bryan Magee, and James Sully, have disputed both the arguments for pessimism and its psychological basis.
Definitions
The word pessimism comes from Latin pessimus, meaning "the worst". The term "optimism" was first used for Leibniz's thesis that this is "the best of all possible worlds"; "pessimism" was coined for the opposing view. Schopenhauer argued that the world is the worst of all possible worlds.
Many scholars define philosophical pessimism as the view that life is not worth living, or that non-existence is preferable to existence. Other writers define it by the claim that the evils of life outweigh its goods, or as "the denial of happiness or the affirmation of life's inherent misery".
Themes
Reaching a pessimistic conclusion can be approached in various manners, with numerous arguments reinforcing this perspective. However, certain recurring themes consistently emerge: Life is not worth living. In short, pessimists view existence, overall, as having a deleterious effect on living beings: to be alive is to be put in a bad position. The bad prevails over the good — generally, the bad wins over the good. This can be understood in two ways. Firstly, one can make a case that — irrespective of the quantities of goods and evils — the suffering cannot be compensated for by the good. Secondly, one can make a case that there is a predominance of bad things over good things. Non-existence is preferable to existence. This point can be understood in one of the two following ways. Firstly, one can argue that, for any individual being, it would have been better had they never existed. Secondly, various pessimists have argued that the non-existence of the whole world would be better than its existence.
Development of pessimist thought
Pessimistic sentiments can be found throughout religions and in the works of various philosophers. The major developments in the tradition started with the works of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who was the first to provide an explanation for why there is so much misery in the world and construct a complete philosophical system in which pessimism played a major role.
Ancient times
Hegesias of Cyrene, who lived in ancient Greece, argued that lasting happiness could not be realized because of constant bodily ills and the impossibility of achieving all one's goals.
One of the central points of Buddhism, which originated in ancient India, is the claim that life is full of suffering and unsatisfactoriness. This is known as duḥkha in the Four Noble Truths. In the book of Ecclesiastes, contained in the Hebrew Bible, the author laments the meaninglessness of human life, views life as worse than death, and expresses antinatalistic sentiments towards coming into existence. These views were of primary focus in Gnosticism, an early religious movement in early Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism, wherein the body is seen as a type of a "prison" for the soul and the world as a type of hell.
19th-century Germany
The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was the first philosopher who constructed an entire philosophical system, where he presented an explanation of the world through metaphysics, aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—all connected with a pessimistic view of the world. Schopenhauer viewed the world as having two sides: Will and representation. Will is pure striving: aimless, incessant, and with no end; it is the inner essence of all things. Representation is how humans as organisms view the world with their particular perceptual and cognitive endowment; it is how humans build objects from their perceptions.
In living creatures, the Will takes the form of the will to live: self-preservation or the survival instinct appearing as striving to satisfy desires. Since this will to life is humans' inner nature, they are doomed to be always dissatisfied, as one satisfied desire makes room for striving for yet another object of desire. There is, however, something humans can do with that ceaseless willing: take temporary respite during aesthetic contemplation or through cultivating a moral attitude. Humans can also defeat the will to live more permanently through asceticism, achieving equanimity.
20th and 21st centuries
In the 20th and 21st centuries, a number of thinkers have revisited and revitalized philosophical pessimism—drawing in large part from the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and his contemporaries. For these writers, pessimism offers anew a metaphysical and ethical perspective from which a contemporary critique of existence might be mounted. Notable 20th- and 21st-century authors who espoused philosophically pessimistic views include Emil Cioran,Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair (1996), Peter Wessel Zapffe, Eugene Thacker, Thomas Ligotti, David Benatar, Drew M. Dalton, and Julio Cabrera.
Main arguments
The most common arguments for the tenets of philosophical pessimism are briefly presented here.
Three marks of existence
According to Buddhism, continual dissatisfaction (duḥkha) is an intrinsic mark of sentient existence. All living creatures are subject to the sufferings of birth, aging, sickness and death; they desire what they do not have, seek to avoid what they find disagreeable, and feel loss when valued things and states pass away. This pattern of craving (taṇhā) is treated as a central source of suffering, grounded not only in external circumstances but also in ingrained tendencies such as greed, lust, envy and self-indulgence.Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta , translated from the Pali version by Bhikkhu Bodhi.
In Buddhism, the concept of duḥkha is closely related to the other two marks of existence: anattā (non-self) and anicca (impermanence). Anattā denies any permanent, unchanging self, holding instead that what is taken to be a "self" is a shifting collection of physical and mental processes. Insight into this lack of a fixed self is said to illuminate duḥkha, because attachment to an imagined, enduring self is taken to reinforce suffering.Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta , translated from the Pali version by Bhikkhu Sujato.
Anicca, or impermanence, means that all conditioned things are in constant flux. Everything a person experiences, including pleasure and joy, is transient. On this view, clinging to experiences, roles or identities is bound to lead to disappointment and renewed suffering when they alter or cease.Dhammapada, Chapter XX (The Path) , translated from the Pali version by Acharya Buddharakkhita.
Taken together, these three marks of existence depict ordinary life as unstable and unsatisfactory. Because liberation or nirvana is defined in contrast to this condition, some interpreters have regarded the Buddhist teachings on duḥkha, anattā and anicca as offering a broadly pessimistic diagnosis of existence, even if such doctrines also set out a path of practice and insight. On this reading, the value of continuing to exist in saṃsāra (the endless cycle of death and rebirth; also, the endless cycle of suffering and craving, seen as a description of the reality we live in) is rejected, and this rejection is taken to be as self-evident as the rejection of suffering itself; accordingly, actions that reduce one's suffering or, especially in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the suffering of other beings, are valued. Liberation from suffering is the central goal of Buddhist philosophy and ethics.
Critique of pleasure
A number of philosophers have put forward criticisms of pleasure, essentially denying that it adds anything positive to our well-being above the neutral state.
A particular strand of criticism of pleasure goes as far back as to Plato, who said that most of the pleasures we experience are forms of relief from pain, and that the unwise confuse the neutral painless state with happiness. Epicurus pushed this idea to its limit, and claimed that "[t]he limit of the greatness of the pleasures is the removal of everything which can give pain". As such, according to Epicureans, one can not be better off than being free from pain, anxiety, distress, fear, irritation, regret, worry, etc. — in the state of tranquillity.
Schopenhauer maintained that only pain is positive, that is, only pain is directly felt — it is experienced as something which is immediately added to our consciousness. On the other hand, pleasure is only ever negative, which means it only takes away something already present in our experience, such as a desire or discomfort. This constitutes his negativity thesis — that pleasure is only ever a relief from pain. Later German pessimists — Julius Bahnsen, Eduard von Hartmann, and Philipp Mainländer — held very similar views. According to Schopenhauer, one way to remove pain is to satisfy a desire; since to strive is to suffer, once a desire is satisfied, suffering momentarily ceases. Expanding on this idea, other thinkers suggest that cravings arise when we focus on external objects or perceive something undesirable in our current situation. These cravings create a visceral need to alter the state of affairs. In contrast, the absence of such cravings leads to a state of contentment or tranquillity, characterized by a lack of urgency to change one's experience.
A stronger version of this view is that there may be no undisturbed states. It is at least plausible that in every state we could notice some dissatisfactory quality such as tiredness, irritation, boredom, loneliness, regret, worry, discomfort, etc. Instead of neutral states, there may simply be "default" states — states with recurrent but minor frustrations and displeasures that, over time, we got used to and learned not to do anything about. Certain thinkers argue that positive experiences are conceptually and empirically difficult to establish as truly distinct or as opposites to negative experiences.
Life contains uncompensated evils