Philosophical pessimism, in contrast to the colloquial use of the term, is not a negative prediction for the future. Philosophical pessimism is the belief that life is a bad bet, overall; the belief that it would have been better to have never been born. It is as much a judgement about the past as it is about the future. It stands opposed to philosophical optimism, which is the belief that life is a good bet, overall. The question is simple: are we glad we exist? A pessimist says no; an optimist says yes.
‘Overall’ is an important word here. Clearly, we all experience times when we are glad to exist and times when we wish we didn’t. Anyone who’s drunk more than a sensible amount of alcohol in an evening will, by the next morning, have first-hand experience of this. What we are looking for is not a particular judgement of a particular time, but a universal judgement of our time ‘overall’. Weighing up all the good and all the bad, all the ups and all the downs, would we have signed up to this ride if we’d known it all beforehand?
It’s important to disambiguate from the colloquial use of ‘pessimism’, if we want to see the philosophical idea clearly. A philosophical pessimist can be hopeful that the future will be better, even predict that it will be, yet remain of the opinion that the good in life is outweighed by the bad. Likewise, a philosophical optimist can fear and predict that the future will be worse but still consider themselves lucky to have it. Our view of the future and our view of life ‘overall’ are not the same thing. It’s one thing to ask whether the future will be better; it’s another thing to ask whether that improved future makes everything ok.
That they are two different things is further shown by the fact that our view of the future, whether rosy or grim, can change how we see the world. The uncertainty of the future, and the fear that that brings, might be enough to trouble your present, significantly devaluing your experience of life. If you conclude that this will always be the case, then you are well on the road to pessimism. You are born and immediately you face a future full of danger, suffering, grief, violence, illness, and eventual death. This danger never relents, never goes away; it paints everything black: better to have never been born.
But you could just as easily come to the same conclusion by looking at the past. Perhaps you look forward to a life of comfort and ease but look back on a life of hardship and suffering, full of trauma and injustice that can never be redeemed or forgotten but only ignored. Whilst predicting that the future will be better, you might find yourself weighing the whole and finding it lacking. No matter how good the future might be, it wasn’t worth the suffering it took to earn it: better to have never been born.
And what if we ask the question not of ourselves and our lives, but of all selves and all lives? An aristocratic child might be born into a future of relative safety, comfort, and privilege – their lives are looking like a good bet – but does that make-good the generations of suffering and inequality that bought them that future? Overall, would we sign off on the product as being worth the price?
Absolutely and clearly not, says a pessimist like Schopenhauer: ‘Optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity.’ Consider the thousands of years of recorded history, and all the injustice, suffering, death, destruction, and atrocity therein; consider the tens of thousands of years before recorded history, with all its hardship, starvation, violence; consider all non-human animal life, for all of biological time, pitched in a constant battle against the cold, the heat, the hunger, the fear or reality of an excruciating death.
How good and how long would the future have to be to make all this worth it? It becomes hard to see what kind of future could measure up to such a weight of suffering. This is where philosophy begins.
‘Life is a business that doesn’t cover the costs.’ Schopenhauer again. For him, this is an essential fact of life: we are such that we strive, but our striving is forever frustrated. We want, and when we want we suffer for our lack of getting. Sometimes we get, giving us temporary relief from our wanting, but then we suffer the boredom of not wanting. So then we want some more, and we end up trapped in an endless cycle of suffering. For Schopenhauer there are only two ways out: the first is through art, truly great art, which short-cuts our ‘will’ and allows us to transcend ourselves, however briefly. Death is the second way out.
Schopenhauer leaves us with limited options. Of course, there are others. If you come to see value in overcoming the horror and absurdity of the world, then you can be glad to be alive to fight the good fight, even though you know you are doomed to lose. Albert Camus pictures life as a Sisyphean task, condemned for all time to push a boulder up to the top of a mountain, only to have the boulder roll down the other side once we achieve our goal, forced to repeat the task over and over again: ‘We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.’ (‘Must’ is an important word there; he does not say that we ‘do’: it’s a matter of attitude.)
Then there are the many schools of thought that teach you to cope with this inescapably bad world. Like the Epicureans: the philosophical equivalent of trying to save a loss-making business by reducing expenditure. If you learn to value the simple things in life, then you will easily find enough good to outweigh the bad; the rest you don’t need to worry about.
Or like the Stoics, you could hold clearly in mind that whilst this suffering is inevitable, your opinion about it is not; as in that famously stoic scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia where he extinguishes a flame with his bare fingers: ‘Of course it hurts…the trick is not to mind that it hurts.’
Whether any of these options are sufficient to the task is something each person needs to decide for themselves. Philosophy can provide the resources, but you have to make of it what you will. More than anything else, what philosophy can do is show the problem in its clearest light. At least then you know what you are up against.
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