Being pluralistic about philosophical pessimism (Part 1)

There are many vernacular senses of pessimism. Familiar images of half-empty glasses go with elaborate talk of ours as ‘the worst possible world’. Pessimistic people might be praised as resolute truth-tellers or condemned as downbeat ‘doom-mongers’. Politicians often condemn pessimism as a call to apathy, a counsel of despair, or a spectacularly ill-timed valorisation of passivity in a world desperately in need of action. Champions of pessimism flag its corrective, balancing role and surprising status as a font of moral hope.

Others revile pessimism as un-American, un-Christian and an abandonment of Enlightenment values. Roger Scruton emphasises the ‘uses of pessimism’, while Raymond Tallis associates it with ‘poverty of spirit and meanness of mind’.

What should we make of these competing concepts and images? The term ‘pessimism’ suffers from being overused and underdefined. Is there an ‘essence’ of pessimism? Can we identify common features – and, if so, are they beliefs, arguments, or certain practical implications?

I think there is a ‘core’ to pessimism and that around it one can build different doctrines of pessimism. This means we should be pluralistic about philosophical pessimism. In practice, pessimists share a common core but vary on their characterisations of human life and their proposals for how to cope with it. If this is right, there can be no ‘knockdown’ arguments against pessimism: for there is no single target. We should assay its varieties, then assess them one by one, without prejudgment or pathologisation.

The conceptual core.

I think pessimism is a judgment on, or appraisal of, human life. It is sustained and modulated by experiences, thought, emotions and moods and habits of deliberation. It is not to be defined in terms of specific emotions, like despair since this prejudges which affective responses ‘go with’ various pessimistic judgments. Some pessimists despair, but others experience sadness, disquiet, or sombre resignation. It also connects, as a matter of possibility rather than necessity, to attitudes such as fatalism and cynicism. Certain definitions of pessimism build too much into it. Other definitions tend to prejudge the combinatorial possibilities, for instance, by regarding ‘hopeful pessimism’ as a contradiction in terms, despite the complexity of hope as a concept.

Pessimism is a judgment – or, better, two closely related judgments. First, the human condition, at least as we know it, is a bad one. More fully: it has one or more entrenched features necessarily destructive of, or antagonistic to, our efforts to achieve and to sustain deep human goods. While no serious pessimist thinks our condition is all bad, they all think it is significantly bad. Much work is needed to spell out these qualitative and quantitative claims: the slogan of some pessimists – ‘bad things are worse than good things are good’ – conceals messy psychological and axiological issues. The bad-making features can include pains, sadness, ‘absurdity’, stubborn habits of discontent, anomie and varieties of alienation, and the species of ‘suffering’ or ‘dis-ease’ encompassed by the Buddha’s talk of dukkha. Such features are not superficial, minor, or contingent: they are integral to the structures and dynamics of human life.

An emphasis on the badness of human life does not get one to pessimism, of course. All but the most delusionally ‘bright-siding’ optimists concede the pains, struggles, and sundry sorrows of human life.

A second judgment is needed: there is little to no serious prospect of the human condition being improved for the better, at least not by human agency. A pessimist thinks the badness of our condition is incapable of substantive, permanent improvement. Most allow a possibility of local, limited, and transient improvements in certain aspects of our condition. (Cioran thought the only clear improvement was in hygiene). Others recognise kinds of non-human moral agency at work in the world – divine grace, maybe, confirming the later Heidegger’s cryptic pronouncement that ‘only a god can save us’. Still, this is nothing we can bring about. The crucial point is that the pessimist must endorse these two judgments: our condition is – and as far as we are able to tell – will remain a bad one.

In fact, certain pessimists want to add a third judgment: the anticipation of deterioration. For them, our condition is bad, will not improve, and in fact will worsen over time, as a result of, for instance, the increasing complexification of social life or the accumulation of increasingly catastrophic decisions and developments. Anticipations of deterioration can be justified by appeals to human nature, induction from our historical track record, or attempts to model possible futures. (Others, like the Buddha, appeal to their alleged psychical abilities). We are ‘f*cked’, argues one author, for the simple reason that we never learn, repeating the same mistakes, even as their consequences increase.

For two reasons, the anticipation of deterioration is not necessary to being a pessimist. First, to be a pessimist, it is enough to think that our condition is bad and likely to remain so. We need not add a further claim about it getting worse. The second strategic reason is that it is very difficult to justify confident claims about the future development of humankind. If a claim is unnecessary and contentious, then it is best to leave it out. It is enough to think our condition is bad and enduringly so. Eco-pessimists are often tempted by deteriorationism – expressed in talk of ‘missed targets’, ‘tipping points’, and spiralling ‘polycrises’. But pessimism can take more than enough force from our current state. I elaborate on this point in part two.

There is also the objection that anticipations of this kind are self-confirming. Other anticipations may be publicly denied by those who endorse them privately.

My suggestion that the core of pessimism are these twin judgments of enduring badness is, of course, too sparse, as it stands. More is needed to elevate pessimistic convictions into something substantive—into doctrines of pessimism.

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