The sad ‘pathologization’ of pessimism

Philosopher in contemplation, by Rembrandt

There's something I find sad, not to say pathetic, whenever the subject of cosmic pessimism, philosophical pessimism, or whatever you want to call it, comes up. It's the blatant pathologization of pessimism, which is tolerated and encouraged, even when the topic is discussed in academia. Absolutely all the people who pathologize pessimism think like this: "If you agree with the thesis that, given the structures of the universe, non-existence is better than existence, you don't just have a different philosophy from mine, you're mentally ill and need to take care of your head." If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is. It's no use now saying people don't do this, because they do, and that's what's truly maddening. It's no coincidence that pessimists, both in academia and outside of it, acquire the habit of being careful not to tread on eggshells. And it's a lie that constructive criticism is offered regularly. It isn't.

At times like these, I even miss those who find Lukács's critique of Schopenhauer's pessimism well-developed. Compared to the common pathologization of pessimism, Lukács's argument is actually quite well-founded. He's light-years ahead. Basically, if you conclude that sentient life is ephemeral and inevitably full of pain because the universe we live in is as it is, then you're mentally ill and need treatment. But of the great pessimistic thinkers of recent history, only two took their own lives: Philip Mainländer and Albert Caraco. Mainländer took his own life as a testament to his philosophy. For him, the cosmos is the fragmentation of a primordial unity — read: God — who, tired of its own eternity, decided to annihilate itself. Instead of the world of becoming being the manifestation of an undivided will to life, as it is in Schopenhauer, for Mainländer it is a manifestation of a fragmented will to death. Mainländer did not take his own life because he was depressed; he did so because he followed his philosophy to the letter.

But he didn't even need to follow it to the letter. He followed it because he wanted to. Good for him. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, never lived as an ascetic, even though the painted the ascetic who denies the will within himself or herself as the epitome of ethics. Until the end of his days, Schopenhauer lived more like an Epicurean than anything else: he received friends at his home and enjoyed the fame he gained after the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena. It's funny. It's become a silly truism to say that Schopenhauer and pessimists in general are like that only because they were depressed, grumpy, and had a bad psychological or even physiological disposition. Nietzsche contributed a lot to this view, because for him, the physiology of the person really does influence their philosophy. For him, Socrates was sick, weak, and therefore his philosophy degraded the world of becoming in favor of a non-existent ideal world. Plato, Socrates' follower, allowed himself to weaken and continued his project of weakness that degraded concrete existence. But there's a problem with all of this. It's well known that neither Socrates nor Plato were weaklings. One had military training and fought in the Peloponnese War, the other was famous for being a wrestler who lifted weights. Even Schopenhauer wasn't prone to weakness, illness, or anything of the sort.

This is where contemporary, crude pseudo-analysis comes in. "Yes," they say, "it may even be that those who reject the world of becoming, the idealists and pessimists, weren't physically weak, but they certainly had some mental issues! They were mentally weak!" If that sounds pathetic, it's because it is. And it's no use now saying that many don't speak in those terms, with those exact words, because many do. At least they should admit it, there would be more dignity in it. I could end this here, but I'm only starting. Peter Zapffe, a pessimistic and antinatalist Norwegian philosopher of the 20th century, was a mountaineer, hiker, and always had a smile on his face. There is a mountain in northern Norway that bears his name: Mount Zapffe. He married twice: first to Bergljot Johnsen, from 1935 to 1941, and second to Berit Christensen, from 1952 until his death in 1990. Despite this generally good disposition, Zapffe, in the documentary The Humorous Pessimist, broadcast by NRK, the Norwegian public radio and television company, said the following:

In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.

This documentary was filmed and shown in 1990, the year of his death. Emil Cioran, the French-Romanian pessimist, frequently met with friends like Samuel Beckett to exchange ideas, and also traveled by bicycle through Europe with his partner, Simone Boué, with whom he lived with from 1942 until his death in 1995. He exhibited the same kind of antinatalist pessimism as Zapffe, writing a book titled The Trouble with Being Born, from which we take the following quote: 

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

Certainly, some pig-spirited person will say that one of them was divorced and the other possibly had problems in his decades-long relationship with his partner, ignoring the fact that people who affirm life as an unquestionable good will continue to make up the overwhelming majority of divorced people, absent parents, murderers, drug addicts, depressed people, suicides, and will also continue to make up the overwhelming majority of people who are awful to their partners, and awful in general. When fathers or mothers annihilate their own families and then take their own lives, when men murder their partners, there is much talk about how such people seek absolute control, or how evil they were, how they were demons, among other things. I don't see any of that. I see people who love life so much and, to use Schopenhauer's language, people who affirm their own will to life so much, that they are willing to hurt others "for love." Yes, for love. They love so much that they cannot live without it. They love passionately, without the slightest detachment, on the contrary. This abundance of love and self-affirmation is an endless source of misfortune. Desert hermits and monks holed up in monasteries in forests or mountains cause way less harm than well-adjusted lovers of existence.

It is the unconditional "yes" to life that is the source of all suffering, of all misfortune, and not the denial, which begins with diminishing oneself in the face of the world. And this is not only human. We are just one among many animals, the one with the greatest apparent freedom of choice. For hundreds of millions of years, the forests and oceans have been full of animal life that, due to their natural programming, say an unconditional "yes" to life. Just look at the slaughterhouse that are the river crossings in the African savanna, the grotesque scenes of zebras trying to quench their thirst in waters infested with giant crocodiles. Some escape with their guts spilling out of their bellies, only to be devoured alive by hyenas and lions. There is no break between these natural misfortunes and our human misfortunes, it is naive to believe there is, since we come from the very same place. We are the work of Mother Nature, the work of Mama Gaia. And she doesn't care about suffering. If she could, she would kill us all. She is not Gaia, the nurturing mother who wants the best for her countless offspring. She is more like Medea. And that's in the best-case scenario. It may very well be that she is not a murderer, but a sadistic torturer, who tries to preserve life in suffering and pain as much as possible, like the figure of Pandora in Brás Cubas's delirium.

In my last text, I included a quote from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a book by Thomas Ligotti that hasn't been translated into Portuguese, although it has a Spanish translation. The quote is as follows:

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture — one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce — rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

That's just the truth. That's why it's so easy for anyone to say that pessimism is a mental illness, a psychological condition that requires treatment: because the "normal" state is optimism, affirmation. In a way, they are right, but not in the sense that they believe. They are right unintentionally, and only in the sense that something within us makes us see the world as it really is, without the optimistic glasses that natural and cultural selection has implanted in most men. We see that the world is a hell disguised as paradise, or at least a hell disguised as a potential paradise. Yes, we are "broken," but we don't have a psychological problem that needs to be treated and cured. What broke in us were the glasses of naiveté, those that work wonders for so many millions of life-affirmers — millions who, despite saying an unconditional "yes" to life, live in depression, despair, anguish, and states of homicidal violence; and all of this without needing the help of philosophical pessimism. In fact, if you ask them, they'll say they think pessimists are "sick." What a load of b.s. It's blatantly obvious that the more optimistic, the more life-affirming and self-affirming someone is, the greater the trail of misfortune, tears, and blood they leave behind. But no. The problem is the pessimist, people insist.

In On the Tragic, Zapffe writes:

Autotelic hope as positive imaginary value is supported by concealment (mental isolation) as a negative complement. It is part of “proper manners” that one should not talk too much about disappointments and loss, illness and pain, the hollowness of marriage and the suffering of age, the dark side of the sex life, the details of digestion, and the horror of death. [...] The “perfect company man” always knows how to avoid or rewrite, and he contributes positively to the common autotelic hygiene by shouting things like: It’ll be fine! Keep smiling! Be optimistic! Keep your head up! Time, time! Cheer up, old pirate, etc. Newspapers are cautious in describing cases of misfortune, and sufficiently pitiful individuals are removed from public places by police assistance.

Despite all the criticism I may have of Nietzsche, at least he wrote, in the posthumous fragments published as The Will to Power:

Truth is ugly. Art is with us in order that we may not perish through truth.

He writes this even though he had written earlier, in the same section 822, that goodness is a sign of lack of dignity, decadence, weakness, etc., harking back to his old idea of the superior Dionysian man as a life affirmer. Fine, it's his right, and anyone's right, to affirm life and believe that this stance is superior to that of the pessimist. Again, nothing out of the ordinary: he's going with the flow, at least from my perspective. But at least he does so without the subterfuge of the belief that everything is beautiful and without accusing the pessimist of being mentally ill and needing treatment simply for seeing life as miserable. Yes, for Nietzsche, the pessimist is ill, but not for seeing the world's suffering. On the contrary, in this respect, Nietzsche considers pessimists correct, they see what naive optimists don't. According to Nietzsche, the pessimist is ill because they have a wrong attitude towards life, an attitude that diminishes their own potential. However, the diagnosis of the world as a misfortune that people endure is present in Nietzsche. In The Gay Science, he writes:

If we had not approved of the Arts and invented this sort of cult of the untrue, the insight into the general untruth and falsity of things now given us by science an insight into delusion and error as conditions of intelligent and sentient existence would be quite unendurable. Honesty would have disgust and suicide in its train. [...] As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still endurable to us.

Nietzsche doesn't say that pessimists are sick and need treatment because they see the world as a vale of tears; he says that pessimists are sick and need treatment because, instead of adapting to this world, which is the only one that exists, they reject it, demonstrating weakness among other things — things that I pointed out were not attributes of pessimists and idealists like Schopenhauer, Mainländer, Zapffe, and Cioran. Is it still despicable to accuse them of weakness when they are not actually weak? Yes, but it's much less despicable than the common and crude assertion that, simply because they see the structures of existence as they are, pessimists suffer from deep depression, are sick, and when treated they will see that things are beautiful and have a greater purpose. Things are not beautiful and do not have a greater purpose. Any purpose they possess is a minor, physiological, chemical, and physical purpose, without any significant function in relation to the whole of the cosmos. For over a hundred million years, the Dinosauria clade dominated the Earth. A rock of about 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter ended that. What great rational purpose did it serve? None.

I think that if they don't do this with Marx, if they don't do it with Nietzsche, if they don't do it with Deleuze, if they don't do it with anyone else, then they shouldn't do it with pessimists — don't judge their conclusions about the world, about existence, based on their mental predispositions. Don't pathologize them, transforming a legitimate thought into illness. Otherwise, it's open season for everyone to use this artifice. A pessimist could come along and say things like: "life-affirmers are sickly euphoric people who revel and laugh even while wallowing in misery and pain; they are delusional, they have visual and auditory hallucinations that make them believe that behind the world there is a spirit, or they believe that art is capable of saving us, or that there is a God in heaven who listens to them. They need treatment." I don't do that. I may think they are mistaken, that they are often naive, that they project patterns where they don't exist, as in history, or even that they believe in illusions. But none of that makes life-affirming people mentally ill and in need of treatment, regardless of whether they are Nietzscheans, Hegelians, Marxists, Heideggerians, Deleuzians, Losurdists, or whatever.

But who am I kidding? This will never end, because it's a way of sweeping aside an unpleasant idea without really addressing it. Even when confronted more directly, they resort to ridiculous subterfuges, as in Lukács's analysis of Schopenhauer that I mentioned earlier, an analysis that never truly addresses the pessimistic conclusion that existence is structurally problematic beyond our best efforts to improve it. Even when they confront more directly the pessimist's idea that non-being is better than being, they still do so through sophistry about how non-existence is impossible and how supposedly we have no way of knowing if a future life will have suffering, which is laughable. When I see that even the few who don't simply pathologize pessimism treat it so poorly, I have no hope that the vast majority will stop treating it as a mental illness.

by Fernando Olszewski