pessimism lodge talk

8/11/2019 Pessimism Lodge Talk

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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 facingphilosophy? 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 Educationhave 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, thethreat 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 facultyand whole departments. (If you dont think that can happen, take a

stroll over the classics department at your local university sometimeif its still there). Another

article, entitled A New Philosophy for the 21st

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;


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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 technologyable 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


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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 theclassic texts

of the pessimistic tradition, and thus a text I would like to engage with now. The suffering of

Dionysus as described in BTis 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, Semele1. 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 suffering2. 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 areindividuated, 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 careand anxiety.We, with our capacity forabstract 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,

1The importance of the double-birth myth is highlighted by Allison (2001), pg.23

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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 caveata 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.

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