Adversus optimismus: against optimism

The fall of the rebel angels, by Luca Giordano

Why pessimism? Why not see the world through the eyes of those who perceive it as rational, necessary, and good, whose ultimate end, despite the suffering, is good, as is the case with theists, pantheists, and so many others who appeal to different natural theologies disguised as philosophies of history? Or, since I don't believe in these things, why not see the world lucidly, knowing that it is grotesque, but embracing it nonetheless, despite the lack of meaning? Why pessimism and not optimism? To convince ourselves that pessimism is, in philosophy, the most correct path, some steps are necessary; steps that, frankly, are not so common, although I believe they are more common than one usually imagines.

It is not purely personal reasons that convince a person that this is the correct philosophical position to take, although purely personal reasons may help to arrive at a pessimistic conclusion. However, in a way, even impersonal reasons end up becoming personal through study. Study, education, and reading make the world personal; they make us care when fires destroy our homes and those of our loved ones, but also when they destroy the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Education makes the world personal, or at least it should, if it were not instrumentalized to serve supposedly technocratic interests, which are nothing more than subterfuges to further enrich the owners of the means of production and their governing friends.

It is the accumulation of knowledge that serves as a starting point for becoming a pessimist. The idea that the more education, the more knowledge, the more negative the view of existence, is not new. The book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 18, says the following about this:

For in much wisdom there is much sorrow; whoever increases knowledge increases grief.

While I agree with the spirit of the verse in general, the truth is that it's not necessary to feel worse after understanding that the world is a dark and meaningless place. The word “world” here refers to the universe, to existence, to the world of becoming itself, not only to the human world, the capitalist world, or any other geographical and historical limitation. Although human systems are capable of worsening the life experience of billions of people, as well as worsening it for billions of animals, the reality is that they are not the only cause of the world being a vale of tears, much less the primary cause of all the misfortune felt by the creatures that have ever crawled on this Earth. It is true that, in the second volume of Parerga and Paralipomena, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other.

However, the problem is structural, not in the sense of a structure created by us and capable of being altered or overcome. It is the world itself, such as it is. Schopenhauer himself recognizes this. It is not only human beings who are tortured on one side and demons on the other; existence itself tortures everyone. We, as part of existence, sometimes assume the roles of the tortured and the demons, but the genesis of all this chaos is not found within us, at least not as individualized representations of the will in Schopenhauerian philosophy.

Returning to the verse from Ecclesiastes, the truth is that there's no need to feel so bad as knowledge increases and we discover that the world is terrible, because many already feel bad beforehand. The belief that life is a gift, a blessing we could never complain about, a belief so deeply ingrained in all of us, causes tremendous discomfort in many individuals. There's a disconnect between this ingrained belief and reality, in a basic sense. We are born to die. Between birth and death we go through hideous circumstances and, occasionally, fleeting happiness. At best, instead of many horrible things, we spend most of our time in boredom. To make matters worse, this whole endeavor has no reason to exist. It's not as if we were an essential part of the universe. Our extinction is guaranteed, as is that of all species. Most of them have already gone extinct.

It seems like a joke. We are like disposable pieces in the hands of gods who amuse themselves with our confusion and pain. That is the reality, and it is in total disagreement with the optimism instilled in all of us from a very early age. Gradually discovering the wisdom that this life is nothing more than a terrible misfortune and that it would have been better not to have existed in the first place can have a positive outcome for certain people. It can take an enormous weight off their shoulders. We cannot romanticize it, either, and say that everything is rosy for them after that. This knowledge is sometimes terrifying and despairing. But I think that, at the moment humanity finds itself in, the dogma of life being a wonderful thing for which we must be grateful is shoved so hard in our throats that, after freeing ourselves from it, it is possible to breathe a little, and that in itself is already a relief, although terror and despair are also present.

In the cases where the discovery brings relief, I would modify the saying from Ecclesiastes as follows: the more knowledge one has, the more one understands how terrible the world is — and this, despite being an unpleasant knowledge, can, under certain circumstances, provide a kind of relief. The relief I speak of comes from no longer having to live with the dissonance between the stark reality that sentient existence is a complete misfortune and the optimistic dogma that life is good and we should kneel before it. Despite this, we must understand that, for many people, perhaps the majority, this dissonance does not exist. For some reason, they do not feel the discomfort that so many others feel, a discomfort caused by the mismatch between reality and what we are taught about the supposed gift of existence.

For all these people, the saying from Ecclesiastes, unfortunately, remains very literal. That's why they will always need gods or secular ideals. Without these things, they wouldn't be able to get out of bed, and if they did, they wouldn't be able to resist the impulse to end it all by ending their own selves or, worse still, hurting and exploiting others because they feel validated in their nihilism. I have no doubt that this is the case with multimillionaire preachers. They don't believe in the god they preach; they don't believe in anything. The moment they realized that the world is chaos, they chose to assert their own will by exploiting the hope of those with an intellectual deficit, the vast majority of the population. The pessimist, however, although understanding that there is no god and that secular ideals are incapable of justifying the world, does not choose self-affirmation at the expense of others.

It is, therefore, the increase in knowledge that makes some people pessimistic, by making them understand that the world is terrible, as Portuguese writer José Saramago said. But, again, the world is not terrible simply because humankind insists on making it so through its cunning, although humanity doesn't help much. The world is terrible because, fundamentally, from its very conception, it is irrevocably terrible. And there is no escape; we are trapped in it from the moment we acquire consciousness until the moment we lose it for the last time. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer writes:

Now, while the thoughtless person feels himself vexed and annoyed hereby merely in real life, in the case of the person who thinks, there is added to the pain in reality the theoretical perplexity as to why a world and a life that exist so that he may be happy in them, answer their purpose so badly. At first it finds expression in pious ejaculations such as, “Ah! why are the tears beneath the moon so many?” and many others; but in their train come disquieting doubts about the assumptions of those preconceived optimistic dogmas.

However, the accumulation of knowledge is not enough. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. I believe there must be an inclination, which has always been with us or, at least, since some point in our lives. This inclination is what separates a Machado de Assis from a millionaire religious leader who exploits the faith of others. Furthermore, a person can very well accumulate considerable knowledge beforehand and not become pessimistic. Despite the increase in knowledge, for a long time an individual may insist on the belief that life is good and that it is worthwhile to fight for the world and our continued existence in it. However, I think that at some point the dissonance becomes too much to bear, and many of us admit defeat.

The world is not good. It is not evil. It is indifferent, but not in a purely neutral way that can always be exploited by sentient beings, provided they are sagacious enough. When a living being extends its paw to the world, the world's response is malignantly cold. As Peter Wessel Zapffe writes in On the Tragic:

In this sense, the uni­verse is alien to ev­ery­thing liv­ing. Fire and drought, storm and cold strike with­out re­gard; it is up to life to save it­self as best it can. The terms of this re­la­tion­ship can be seen in the im­age of a res­i­dence per­mit that can be with­drawn at any point in a ter­ri­fy­ing bar­baric coun­try where the lan­guage is strange, and that op­er­ates ac­cord­ing to or­ders from un­known and in­ac­ces­si­ble en­ti­ties, and where one can be tor­tured and killed at any time.

This is where the thought of people like Schopenhauer becomes inescapable. The foundation of the world as something dark and indifferent to the desires of sentient beings — this is what philosophies like his represent in the imagination of the pessimist. Although Schopenhauer was not the first to think that existence massacres its children without good reason, he was the first to systematize this type of thought in contemporary times, which is why he became a landmark. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Schopenhauer's transcendental idealist epistemology, which often confuses even academics who have studied his writings for decades, as well as other clearly dated and problematic parts of his elaborations, what is important is the overall message about the world and the role that all our brief lives have within it.

The vision that Schopenhauer sought to systematize in his philosophy was certainly inspired by hints of philosophical pessimism found in other thinkers throughout history, many of whom are not normally associated with pessimism, others who are. They range from Buddha Sakyamuni and Jesus Christ to David Hume and Giacomo Leopardi. These hints are found in diverse writings, from the Sumyutta Nikaya and the New Testament to the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the Zibaldone. The pessimistic view is that the world is structured in such a way that friction always chips away at everything that exists, until what exists returns to more elementary states. Not even powerful physical objects like black holes escape this logic. The drama of living beings unlucky enough to be able to feel painful stimuli stems from this: they feel their pieces being chipped away.

The universe behaves as a thirst for manifestation, what Schopenhauer calls Will. We are all part of it, we are all connected, children of this thirst. But manifesting oneself in the world of becoming has a price. When we step on the ground, we step on ourselves. But the ground, when devoid of sentient life, feels nothing. The moral problem arises when subjects become victims of this process, victims of existence itself. Seeing this state of affairs, the pessimist rejects existence, treating it as a sentence to be served and not as a gift.

Other answers are possible, of course. Most people don't even think about it, embracing fantasies and going about their day, becoming victims of preachers, charismatic leaders, and various drugs. They are content, even though their lives are terrible. They don't perceive their condition. Others think about it and disagree with pessimism, embracing more elaborate philosophical fantasies to justify misfortunes, such as the idea that history has a purpose, as in the case of Hegel and his various derivatives. In the end, they are in the same boat as those who are victims of preachers, charismatic leaders, and various drugs; the only difference is that they provide elegant justifications for their vices. Others agree with pessimism, knowing that any meaning is pure fantasy and that the world is a vale of tears, but say they embrace life anyway — this was the answer of Nietzsche and his intellectual descendants.

From a pessimistic point of view, however, the different justifications used to absolve the vale of tears in which we find ourselves are variations of the same perspective: optimism. Just as with pessimism, we shouldn't think of optimism here in the common sense of the word. Existential or metaphysical optimists can very well be pessimistic about various things. For example, no one would say that the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, considering the entirety of his philosophy, was a pessimist, even though he was pessimistic about several historical events that occurred during his life. His philosophical vision was admittedly optimistic; that is, he believed that existence was worthwhile. In fact, whether existence was good or bad was something that, given his philosophical worldview, he didn't even question.

A colloquial phrase used to describe this intellectual attitude, which sweeps the suffering of the world under the rug by considering existence a concrete fact beyond question, is this: existence is neither good nor bad, it simply is. Yes, it's true, I even wrote something similar a moment ago. However, treating existence in this way means implicitly approving of it. It remains optimism regarding the world, even if it's not an overt, explicit, and naive optimism. As I said before: the world is neither good nor bad, it is indifferent; however, its indifference is not neutral in a romantic way, it is not neutral in a way that can be incredibly useful by life. It's not as if life can flourish beautifully as long as you have the courage to fight and win. In fact, this type of stance sounds like empty life-coach talk, where everything depends on us and if we fail, the blame is solely ours.

It may seem harsh to compare complex philosophies with the rambling rhetoric of a 21st-century life-coach grifters, but in the end it amounts to the same thing. Ultimately, they all try to justify the unjustifiable. As Schopenhauer writes in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation:

This world is the battle-ground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths. Then in this world the capacity to feel pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree that is the higher, the more intelligent the man. To this world the attempt has been made to adapt the system of optimism, and to demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. However, an optimist tells me to open my eyes and look at the world and see how beautiful it is in the sunshine, with its mountains, valleys, rivers, plants, animals, and so on. But is the world, then, a peep-show? These things are certainly beautiful to behold, but to be them is something quite different.

The universe is alien to all that lives, to the point of being hostile. The survival of life, in its various forms and species, does not depend on us, but on the environment, which can revoke our permission to reside at any moment. It may not even grant permission to reside in the first place. Perhaps the most compelling proof of this lies in the fact that we have only found life here on Earth so far. As far as we know, life is not common elsewhere, and in the case of places like Mars, where it is speculated that life may have existed in the past, it has disappeared millions of years ago. There would be no problem in accepting an existence where everything is submitted to friction is the general rule, as long as this did not negatively affect anyone. But that is not the case. On Earth, the only place where we know life exists, it has existed for hundreds of millions of years, and countless beings are still affected in absurdly negative ways simply because they were born.

The same would happen in other places in the universe where, by chance, sentient life also came to spring forth. Again in the second volume of Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer writes:

We should be driven crazy if we contemplated the lavish and excessive arrangements, the countless flaming fixed stars in infinite space which have nothing to do but illuminate worlds, such being the scene of misery and desolation and, in the luckiest case, yielding nothing but boredom-at any rate to judge from the specimen with which we are familiar.

To paint this Dantean picture in a positive light, asserting that we must accept reality regardless of the suffering, becomes reprehensible the moment such an attitude perpetuates a wretched situation, from which the only salvation is not to participate, not to be. By praising the world without any reservations, we are endorsing all the horrors of which it serves as a stage. In an interview for the book Reflections in a Magic Mirror: Voices of Our Century, edited by journalist Haagen Ringnes and published in 1998, Zapffe said that having children in this world is like bringing wood into a burning house. Optimism, regardless of the mask it uses to deceive us, serves as propaganda and an incentive for us to bring more of the fuel that feeds this inferno of a world — a type fuel that, far from being inanimate and indifferent to the fire, will itself be a victim that will scream and writhe in the flames.

by Fernando Olszewski