Pessimism in philosophical terms is the acceptance that the world is flawed. By extension, pessimists reject what they regard as faith-based expressions of optimism, such as religion and progress – beliefs which, the pessimist says, are likely to result in disappointment. Optimists, meanwhile, hold that the world is either as good as it can be or else is set on a path towards that end. To this extent, most philosophers must be regarded as at least partly optimistic, since the very act of philosophizing suggests a hope that one might make things better.
The best of all possible worlds
We can look to works such as Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia as examples of optimistic philosophy in their desire for social perfection. However, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the classic model of the optimist philosopher, largely thanks to his assertion in Theodicy (1710) that we have the ‘best of all possible worlds’. That was not to say that he believed the world was perfect, but merely that it is as good as God could have created and thus any alternative would be worse.
Leibniz found himself bearing the brunt of Voltaire’s mockery in his satirical masterpiece, Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759). ‘Optimism,’ asked one of the characters in Candide, ‘what is that?’ ‘Alas!’ replied Candide, ‘it is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.’ Voltaire was thus the first public figure to be labelled a pessimist, a tag he struggled to shrug off thanks to other works such as his Poéme Sur le Désastre de Lisbonne reflecting on the relationship between Man and God, which he wrote in the aftermath of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped establish France as the capital of Enlightenment pessimism through his assertion that the establishment of ‘civil society’ had brought down ‘crimes, wars, and murders . . . horrors and misfortunes’ upon mankind. Man, he argued, had been better off left in his ‘natural state’. Nonetheless, Rousseau’s great faith in the redeeming powers of human nature marks him out as an optimist in other respects.
Elements of pessimism also underpinned aspects of existentialism (see here) and absurdism (see here), marking out the battle between philosophical pessimism and optimism as still unresolved. In his 1973 novel, Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein reflected on it thus: ‘Don’t ever become a pessimist . . . a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.’
The aimlessness of life
The archetypal pessimist philosopher is doubtless Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who believed that humans are subject to an unthinking, aimless universal will. Blending elements of Eastern and Western philosophy, he maintained that the will of the individual and the will of the cosmos are one and the same – responsible for all experience but eternal, indivisible and directionless. So while we may hope our lives have a point, he argued, we are ultimately driven by an aimless force. Moreover, even as the will compels us to strive to achieve our goals, we are destined for disappointment since we either achieve them (granting us only brief satisfaction and denying ourselves motivation to go on) or we fail and experience dissatisfaction. Schopenhauer argued that acceptance of our lot would provide us with the space to live lives compassionately and without unnecessary angst – echoing the ‘non-existence’ recommended by Buddhism.