Jonathan Head

Pessimism and Philosophy Today

I want to talk today about philosophical pessimism. The history of holding a pessimistic view
about the world and the nature of human existence is a long one, but it has been greatly neglected
recently as a philosophical position (one notable exception being Joshua Dienstags Pessimism :
Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit). Due to this, I think that philosophical pessimism is long overdue a revival; it
has been around since ancient Greek thought, and embraces in its tradition great figures such as
Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, and so is well worth revisiting. In fact, I wish to argue
today that a re-examination of the possibilities of engagement for philosophy with pessimism is
needed more than ever. So, I want, in this short talk, to deal with three key questions, and offer at
the least the beginnings of answers to these questions; 1) What are the problems facing philosophy
today? 2) What is philosophical pessimism? 3) How can it help us solve the problems facing
philosophy? I hope to convince you that pessimism can play a crucial future role in philosophy, as
long as we are willing to dispose of any presuppositions we might have about it and use its resources
to our benefit.
So what problems are facing philosophy today? Two recent articles, both heavily criticised
but nevertheless interesting, from The Chronicle of Higher Education have highlighted some of the
great difficulties facing philosophy and its future existence as an academic field. An article entitled
Making Philosophy Matter paints a picture of a philosophical world in decline, with falling student
numbers, a quickly shrinking job market for junior philosophers, and departments under threat. Such
events could not be more serious for the future of philosophy; To those who are tenured, the
threat may still seem distant. The barbarians are not quite at the gates. But if we do not intervene,
soon the threats will not just be to our enrollments or course offerings (or junior faculty), but also to
the ranks of tenured faculty and whole departments. (If you dont think that can happen, take a
stroll over the classics department at your local university sometime if its still there). Another
article, entitled A New Philosophy for the 21
st
Century, written by two members of the philosophy
faculty at the University of North Texas, places particular emphasis on the threat to smaller
departments that are more vulnerable to cuts in state funding for education; Philosophy is secure
at Americas elite universities. But what of the vast number of universities whose future is tied to the
decisions of state legislatures or other financial conditions? At these colleges, philosophy is now
subject to powerful cultural trends that include a distrust of the public realm, a utilitarian habit of
mind where only what is countable actually counts, and a widespread assumptions that values are
mere preferences to be tabulated and traded rather than critically assessed and debated. The main
concern of both articles with regard to philosophy can be contained in one word, irrelevancy. The
concerns of academic philosophers have become too far removed from the concerns of those
around them, to the detriment of both parties; philosophers have lost their way, burrowing their
way more deeply into niches, knowing more and more about less and less, and focusing on
questions that most people would understand, never mind thinking of them as related to their
concerns, and in turn the world has lost the benefit our collective wisdom as philosophers. So three
major issues face philosophy today as I see it;

1. Dwindling support from government, leading to a loss of public funding
2. Dwindling interest in philosophy from students, particularly at less prestigious departments
3. Difficulty for philosophers in producing work that has relevancy for those not philosophically
trained
4. Difficulty in avoiding tendency to over-specialisation
If we rediscover pessimism as a philosophical tool, framing both the questions we ask and the
methodologies we employ to ask them, then perhaps we can begin to relieve difficulties 3 and 4,
which in turn may help bring back support from government and from students.
So, one might think, how could pessimism, reaffirmed as a viable philosophical viewpoint,
aid us in the dire situation in which we find ourselves? Such a question might seem especially hard to
answer if we take pessimism in its ordinary, unsophisticated form. The basic position of
philosophical pessimism is often seen as synonymous with the so-called Wisdom of Silenus, and a
famous Aristotelian quotation of Silenus that is found in Plutarch; For men, the best for them is not
to be born at all this should have the first place in our choice; and the next to this is, when we are
born, to die as soon as we can. Such an approach to the world and human existence appears a
rather barren and unpromising view, and certainly nothing that can aid us in our attempt to ensure
the future of philosophy. Our existence, through and through, is utterly hopeless, and even worse, is
evil and should be shortened as much as possible. The tradition of philosophical pessimism,
however, sees that there is far more to pessimism than this. The real basis of the pessimistic
tradition lies in a certain conception of time, from which its peculiar approach to the world and
human existence follows. Our understanding of time has evolved throughout the history of
civilization, and from the Middle Ages onwards an emphasis upon its linearity became increasingly
pronounced. Whilst linear time might just as well lead to a profound optimistically view of history,
with things getting progressively better from now to eternity, the linearity of time was soon seen as
applying to consciousness also, an application which lends itself more to pessimism than the other
way. The linearity of the time within which we are conscious eventually brings to mind an idea of an
end of consciousness that is much more final, and therefore much more striking, than it would be
within a conception of time as cyclical. The possibility of the end of my consciousness is the first sign,
and a major one at that, that things do not necessarily get better (I am going to die), and therefore I
should not presume that things will get better more generally in the history of the world. We are led
through such reasoning inexorably to a familiar pessimistic stance; things will not necessarily get
better. Such a pessimist will hold such an opinion even if things do seem to be getting better; a
pessimist will not deny that technology continues to develop at a fast pace, with such technology
able to undertake more tasks at a faster rate, but will question the presumption that such
developments make the world, and the existence for the individual, any better. A pertinent feature
of pessimism to note at this juncture, however, is that pessimism does not have the teleological
features that an optimistic theory of progress will have; it does not argue that things will get worse,
just that we should not expect things to get better (and even that it may be antithetical to our
interests to expect things to get better).
So, some of the major features of philosophical pessimism that we can identify are as
follows:
1. A linear conception of time
2. Emphasis upon the nature of consciousness, particularly in relation to its end
3. Denial of the necessity of progress
I want to try now to answer our third question that we started with, and try to identify such
ways in which philosophical pessimism might give us some of the tools to face the current problems
of philosophy. Nietzsches first major published work, The Birth of Tragedy, is one of the classic texts
of the pessimistic tradition, and thus a text I would like to engage with now. The suffering of
Dionysus as described in BT is a demonstration of the suffering that every human individual goes
through; the identification of such a parallel within Greek thought is justified because Greek gods
must be conceived of as living alongside mankind in the natural world, indeed sometimes even
interbreeding takes places between the two, and thus not standing at the sort of infinite distance
from mankind that the Judeao-Christian God is conceived as taking. In particular, Dionysus was
conceived of as having both human and divine attributes through the process of a double-birth,
torn to pieces upon the order of Hera, the wife of Zeus, and then impregnated by Zeus within the
mortal, Semele
1
. The trials and tribulations of Dionysus, therefore, within the context of Greek myth,
must be seen as a very close parallel to the experiences of the ordinary human being. Nietzsche
reflects upon the suffering of Dionysus; he writes, his being torn into pieces, the genuinely
Dionysiac suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, so that we are to regard
the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering
2
. The bringing of Dionysus
into the individuation of the natural world is the cause of Dionysus suffering, with humanity, as
Nietzsche describes it, being born from his tears. Nietzsche goes on to state that such a myth
offers us all the constituent elements of a profound and pessimistic way of looking at the world
the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity, the view that individuation is the
primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, a
premonition of unity restored. The most fundamental way in which things in the natural world are
individuated, from a Kantian perspective, is through time, that which structures our own inner
experience as well as our outer experience, and thus on a fundamental level, bringing Dionysus into
time is what brings about his suffering.
One of the effects of our time-consciousness upon human experience is a deep
dissatisfaction with existence. In his Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer talks, almost
enviously, of the existence of the animal that does not carry the burden of time-consciousness.
Without a consciousness of time forming the context of all their experience, the animal has an
enviable tranquillity and placidity and are much more satisfied than we by mere existence due
primarily to the fact that [they] remain free from care and anxiety. We, with our capacity for
abstract knowledge and our time-consciousness, are able to comprehend a whole realm of
possibility as regards the past and future, whilst the animal comprehends only the narrow and
actual present. We are able to reflect upon ourselves in this wider context and thus have a
conception of self-improvement, which leads in turn to a perpetual dissatisfaction with ourselves,
reinforced by a social existence in which we inevitably compare ourselves with others. Pessimism, as
should be clear through these considerations, have a clear notion of a fundamental uneasiness as
the heart of human existence, an uneasiness that optimistic philosophies can only deny and attempt
to obscure. The first step towards dealing with a problem is of course to acknowledge its existence,

1
The importance of the double-birth myth is highlighted by Allison (2001), pg. 23
2
BT 10
and the fact that it is a universal problem, for it is one that lies at the heart of what it is to be human,
means that any attempt to deal with such a problem through pessimistic reflections will speak to all
those who take the time to hear it.
The enemy of the piece within BT is the figure of Socrates, and the trends in philosophy that
he represents for Nietzsche. The Socrates that we find in BT is rationalistic and optimistic in a
pernicious way. In BT, Nietzsche gives an account of how the advent of Socratism signalled the end
for Greek tragedy, and particularly in Chapter 14, he focuses upon the dialectical method as a major
part of optimistic thought. He writes, The optimistic dialogue drives music out of tragedy under the
lash of its syllogisms; i.e. it destroys the essence of tragedy which can only be interpreted as a
manifestation and transformation into images of Dionysiac states, as the visible symbolization of
music, as the dream-world of Dionysiac intoxication. He later reaffirmed the connection between
optimism and dialectics in his Attempt at Self-Criticism, those things which gave rise to the death
of tragedy Socratism in ethics, the dialectics, smugness and cheerfulness of theoretical man
might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of exhaustion, of sickness, of the anarchic
dissolution of the instincts? So what is Nietzsches problem with dialectics? Dialectics is optimistic
to the extent that is presupposes the inevitability of progress; thesis will be met with antithesis, and
an improved synthesis will emerge, and of course the holding of such an assumption can make us
complacent, and even bring us to cease striving for progress (for what is the point of striving if
progress is going to happen anyway?) Nietzsches critique seeks to go further than this, however;
there is something oddly lifeless in dialectics, a slow and methodical process progressing by reason
alone. Rogerio de Almeida expresses it well when he writes, The concept is ice cold, a symptom of
indigence rather than an ascendant and overflowing life, which justifies itself, affirms itself in its
excess of force
3
. The results of the dialectical process are not such that it can speak to those not
thoroughly set into the scientific approach, for in the course of everyday life, we are governed just as
much by intuition and the imagination as by reason. In turn, philosophy is deprived of the
imaginative faculties that can make great leaps in thought, transcending the laborious process of
dialectics. One cannot help thinking of Nietzsche applying just the same critique to much of the
philosophical work produced today; how can the endless tweaking of concepts that occupies much
of the philosophers time have any relevance to the every-day experience, and the deeper existential
puzzles that require a little imagination as well as reasoning?
However, a major question still needs to be answered; wouldnt pessimism kill philosophy, in
that it acts as a decisive reason in favour of giving up all effort in attempting to improve the world,
including answering the fundamental questions of human existence that philosophy is intended to
answer? We might perhaps have in mind here a kind of Schopenhauerian resignationism as the
fundamental end-point of any pessimistic approach to philosophy, in which one gives up all willing
and resigns oneself to an awful existence in an awful world. Such an idea may have done much to
repel philosophers from pessimism in the past, but this is most certainly not a necessary end-point
for any pessimistic philosophy. At the heart of pessimism is a rejection of the hedonistic calculus that
still dominates much ethical thought. The hedonistic calculus weighs pleasures and pains, and judges
human existence as worthwhile (or not) dependent upon which side the scales tip. A simple
resignation from the world after having been confronted by the world in which we live relies upon
the hedonistic calculus just as much as an optimist; the pains outweigh the pleasures to such an

3
de Almeida, 17
extent that it is best to withdraw from the world and human existence as much as possible. The
pessimist seeks to transcend the bounds of philosophical discourse implicitly dominated by the
hedonistic calculus. Further to this, resignationism is rejected by the relation to the future we take
on within a true pessimistic perspective. Given that we are not entitled to expect progress in the
future, and that the future we might hope for might not last long even if it were achieved, we are
forced to focus back onto the present in order to ensure that our actions have some value in the
present. Optimism in philosophy can be seen to make us focus on an imaginary future; it operates
upon the implicit assumption that questions such as the nature of knowledge, of beauty, of right and
wrong and so forth, will have final answers. Rather, philosophy should focus upon the present; not
cutting off thought about the future altogether, but making sure that it is not idolising it at the
expense of concern for the present. The unpredictability and instability of the future that the
pessimistic tradition recognises thereby increases our freedom in the present; we are no longer
slaves to a telos of history, and thus can be free to be more imaginative in our projects today.
Resignationism might see the lack of such a destiny and grounds for hopelessness, but I hope it is
clear that this is antithetical to the pessimistic way of thought.
There is, however, a final caveat a limitation upon the transformative effects of
philosophical pessimism. It may be the case that our efforts do not bring about a change in the world
for the better, but this does not mean that pessimism has no valuable effect to have; such an
assumption would be a mere reflection of the optimism that continues to pervade our thought.
Rather, the effect of pessimism has to be understood as primarily speaking to each individual,
helping them to deal with the difficulties they face in the course of their existence. Hence you find,
at the very pinnacle of Schopenhaurian philosophy, a promise of a change in consciousness, a better
consciousness, that brings an end to our suffering. So, here is a summary of the points I wish to
make regarding what pessimism offers philosophy;
1. A conception of the future which allows us to focus upon our present projects in a
more imaginative and productive way, with fewer restraints imposed by an idol of
the future
2. A way of way of doing philosophy that speaks to each individual, beyond the
confines of the academic community, through a focus upon general problems of
existence (problems that are not affirmed as such in an optimistic framework)
3. A richer approach to the world in transcending the hedonistic calculus
4. Moves beyond the dialectical approach into a less ordered sphere of discourse, and
thus more allowance for leaps of the imagination
I believe the results of a greater adoption of the pessimistic framework of discourse in philosophy
will be to better engage those outside the philosophical community, thus attracting greater interest
to the discipline, and will also help to reverse the drive towards specialisation that has fragmented
the philosophical world so much. Though much work remains to be done as regards specific ways in
which a pessimistic framework can be applied within the philosophical community today, I hope I
gone way to persuade you that the tradition of pessimism in philosophy, and the myriad figures
contained within, are worth a second look in relation to your future work.