This post is a part of an ongoing biweekly series on philosophical pessimism and related positions. You can find other posts in the series here.
Philosophical pessimism is justly associated with two stark claims. First, human life is fundamentally and inescapably a condition of suffering, making happiness virtually unattainable. Second, human life is devoid of whatever meaning would satisfy humans—it is an ultimately insignificant, absurd, meaningless enterprise playing itself out amidst the indifferent vastness of the cosmos. Given that happiness and meaning above all else make human life worthwhile, the world’s consistent refusal to realize those values makes human life a very bad prospect indeed. These are the days of our lives: squalid birth, meager fulfillment, boundless disappointment, uncompensated and unredeemed suffering, grinding pointlessness, annihilating death. In fact, life is such a bad prospect that it is a state of being worse than non-existence. Better never to have been at all.
Could any of that be true? If so, what features of human existence make happiness and meaning unattainable? And if pessimism is true, is it possible to make the human condition better? For some, even entertaining these questions gives pessimism more credit than it deserves. Many find pessimism’s claims about the “bad news” of human life obviously false, or laughable, or repugnant, or even immoral (all charges, it should be noted, which can be and have been credibly marshalled against various species of optimism.)
On the other hand, pessimism deserves more than automatic dismissal. Historically, it deserves a great deal of credit for keeping fundamental questions about human life’s justification, value, and meaning on the table during a late modern decline in religious belief and authority. It has much the same function now, in an age where there is a great deal of pressure to think that these questions are pointless, badly formed, or settled by complacent appeals to old religion, New Age spirituality, a relativistic “follow your bliss” self-help industry, technocratic optimism, or simply head-in-the-sand avoidance.
Moreover, despite appearances, pessimism can be useful. Its attunement to the dark underbelly of existence gives it an ironic sensibility that is valuable to political critique. For example, pessimism is well-placed to observe the mismatch between modernity’s self-congratulatory conception of “progress” and the actually existing conditions of human life.
Consider the situation of many of us in the generally materially well-off Global North. Technology, colonialism, and the forces of global capital have largely democratized access to forms of entertainment, leisure, and convenience which (we assure ourselves) would have astonished our ancestors—and yet we’re largely bored, anxious, tired, depressed, annoyed, and unhappy. We have never been more free, we assert, coerced by economic necessity into exploitative work we despise while the state, itself captured by the interests of an aggressively anti-democratic elite ruling class, abandons the majority of the world’s people to contend with various forms of social precarity and violence. In the midst of patterns of drought, heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes that would seem utterly catastrophic less than a century ago, we cling to unsustainable consumption habits and respond to short-term economic incentives while affecting ignorance of the incalculable suffering that anthropogenic climate change has already begun to visit on the most historically disadvantaged groups of people, born in places far from us in space and time. Scientific innovation will save “us” (or at least those of us already well-placed to benefit from it) we claim, at the same time that the specter of total nuclear annihilation continues to haunt the historical present. It is, I submit, not obviously true that human life is a good bet under these conditions. Just an honest look at the modern predicament challenges us to say just where pessimism speaks falsely.
The idea that pessimism could offer a worthwhile re-evaluation of the “usual” answers to life’s big questions while also providing us with this critical political perspective may seem strange. After all, isn’t there a necessary connection between pessimism and despair, fatalism, apolitical defeatism, “giving up,” and other forms of complacency? While some pessimists explicitly endorse apoliticism, several scholars of pessimism have done valuable work in demonstrating that a commitment to fatalism, defeatism, or apoliticism is not entailed by pessimism. Even some of the darkest pessimists emphatically rejected these stances. Yet behind the faulty assumption of a necessary connection between these ideas is an important challenge: what would it mean to affirm a form of pessimism that speaks truthfully about suffering and the inevitable constraints of human limitation on the one hand while fueling a political critique that seeks the amelioration of a very bad world on the other?
In order to understand why pessimism often seems to preclude itself from political critique and just how its insights can be brought to bear on political issues, we need to distinguish between pessimism’s skeptical function and its critical function.
Sometimes pessimism advances skepticism about the possibility of the good life. Whatever you think the good life involves—pleasure, having your desires satisfied, leading a meaningful life, religious transcendence, political participation, family relations, moral rectitude, etc.—pessimism is here to show that human life (your life) probably fails to realize these goods in a manner severe enough to make it rational to regret your existence.
That idea might sound preposterous. After all, most people report that their lives are relatively good overall. And even when they acknowledge that life could be better, it is certainly not the case that most people consistently express a desire to have never been born in the first place. Isn’t this enough to send the grumpy pessimist packing?
It is, if we assume that judgments about the quality of our own lives settle the question of whether our lives are worth living. But why assume that? Optimists and pessimists alike often want to draw a distinction between thinking that your life is going well and it actually going well. A pessimist might point out that a person could think that they are relatively happy, but in reality are simply in denial about the real quality of their life. As viewers of It’s a Wonderful Life will remember, optimists can make much the same argument: sometimes people can judge their lives to be very bad while inappropriately overlooking the things that make the quality of their life quite good from a more “objective” point of view.
Once we distinguish between judgments of the quality of our lives and the actual quality of those lives, the question becomes how reliable our generally positive judgments about the quality of our lives are. Pessimists often point out that our judgments of the quality of our own lives tend to skew to the optimistic side of the spectrum: we overestimate how good our lives are and underestimate how bad they are. In short, we’re just biased in favor of optimism.
Consider some examples. We tend to underestimate how much time we spend in negative or neutral mental states such as pain, boredom, and frustration, and overestimate how much time we spend in positive mental states such as pleasure or feelings of fulfillment. We tend to judge the quality of our lives not on their own terms, but relative to the quality of lives we observe around us (“sure, maybe I hate my job, resent my partner, and am perpetually annoyed with my kids, but I can’t complain—after all, it could be worse!”) We excel at adjusting our expectations to adapt to strongly negative circumstances, and we bounce back from even very severe setbacks. While it is in some sense a blessing that we have these abilities, it also means that we’re poorly equipped to judge just how bad our lives in these negative circumstances can be. And this is not even to mention the various ways in which we overlook or affect ignorance of others’ suffering, particularly those people (and other sentient beings) who lie outside our narrow circles of concern. Human life is simply much worse than we think it is. (Of course, there will always be those who simply do not care whether their judgments of their lives’ quality accurately capture their “real” quality: as long as my life seems pretty good, that’s enough, right? Perhaps relevant in this connection is an interesting point made by a scholar of pessimism Joshua Foa Dienstag—pessimism suggests that we can choose happiness or wisdom, but not both.)
In its skeptical mode, pessimism represents human capacities to achieve the good life as severely and tragically limited. We are finite, fragile, precarious creatures, perpetually vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and even the luckiest among us lead lives in which the bad prevails over the good. As the contemporary pessimist and prominent anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar puts it (punnily), “no life is good.” (Professor Benatar previously contributed a primer on pessimism to this series).
I believe that there is value in pessimism’s skepticism about the possibility of the good life. Yet its tendency to target all candidate theories of well-being often drives it to claim that fundamental, cross-historical, cross-cultural constraints on the human condition ensure that human beings systematically fail to achieve the good life. And this, I suggest, can end up precluding a more politically critical form of pessimism.
Consider Arthur Schopenhauer. In some moods, the great pessimist seems to have held that human life is intrinsically a condition of pointless suffering. One of his arguments for this conclusion is that “willing and striving” are the “whole essence” of human life, and that we are “destined to pain” on this basis. For Schopenhauer, striving after a goal itself involves suffering, since in striving toward some object of desire, the lack of that object is painful for the striver. What about when we obtain the object of which we were so desirous? Things are hardly better: after a vanishingly brief moment of satisfaction or contentment, the striver either must strive after a new object of desire, or find themselves bored, anxious, and adrift. As Schopenhauer bleakly concludes: “Hence… life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.”
Schopenhauer’s analysis of striving (which seems to primarily target hedonistic and desire-satisfaction accounts of well-being) is controversial. Yet it’s worth noting just how deep and central he takes this source of dissatisfaction to be to human life. In a passage showcasing Schopenhauer at his amusingly caustic best, he suggests that our fundamentally striving nature would render our lives unhappy, painful, and pointless even if worldly conditions were very different from what they are.
“Work, worry, toil and distress are indeed the lot of almost all human beings their whole life through,” Schopenhauer claims. “But if all wishes came true no sooner than they were made, then what would occupy human life and on what would time be spent? Suppose this race were transported to a fool’s paradise, where everything grew on its own and the pigeons flew around already roasted, and everyone found his dearly beloved and held on to her without difficulty. There some would die of boredom, or hang themselves, but some would assault, throttle and murder each other, and thus cause more suffering for themselves than nature now places on them. Thus for such a race no other venue, no other existence is suitable.”
Schopenhauer’s examples are odd, but the point is clear: even if we humans were to eliminate our current sources of strife and achieve everything we’d ever wanted out of life, our insatiable, restless, striving nature would surely drive us back into the condition of suffering. Sentiments like this may be what people have in mind when they presume there to be an essential link between pessimism and fatalism or defeatism. If intrinsic, ineradicable facts about human nature make it the case that human life is going to be very bad regardless of whether we live in the actual world or in the “fool’s paradise,” what’s the point of trying to do anything about it?
Enter the critical function of pessimism. In its critical mode, pessimism suggests that human life is relatively—not absolutely—bad, and that the relative badness of human life is to a large extent determined by the social, political, cultural, and economic structures under which those lives are lived.
To get a taste of this perspective, consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau tells an idealized story of how human beings gradually move beyond the basic desires that can be fairly easily satisfied in the state of nature to more specific and sophisticated desires that can only be cultivated and satisfied by more complex societies.
Complex societies involve goods that are in many respects of higher quality than those available in the state of nature (e.g. culinary diversity, aesthetic experiences, etc.) Yet these come with a hidden cost. “A great deal of leisure” allows people to “furnish [themselves] with many conveniences” which soon become “habitual.” But once habituated to these conveniences, they “entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time degenerated into true needs.” As a result, “it became much more cruel to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.” An acquired taste for luxury (e.g. top-shelf cocktails) and convenience (e.g. food delivery apps) leaves us extremely unhappy when we are deprived of those goods, and somewhat under-satisfied even when we do attain them. Hence an ironic relationship: the greater and more available the goods, the more intense our dissatisfaction.
If Rousseau is right, modern human life isn’t bad just because humans have desires—it’s bad because human beings have developed contingent, particular desires shaped and encouraged by the increasing “perfection” and self-regard that modern (European) society cultivates. Human life might not have been so bad if human beings had not developed a thirst for perfection and novelty in the deleterious way that modern society encourages them to. Indeed, the state of nature is proof that humans are not always and everywhere condemned to live bad lives: as long as human desires remained relatively simple and the things that fulfilled those desires relatively abundant, individuals were able to live “free, healthy, honest, and happy lives, so long as their nature allowed.”
Scholars disagree on whether Rousseau was really a pessimist or not. Yet the ideas that larger social forces can instill in us a desire for a certain socially mediated conception of the good life, and that these socially mediated desires can end up being a major source of our sufferings are hallmarks of pessimism’s critical function (this dynamic is also at the heart of what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant diagnosed as “cruel optimism.”)
This insight is valuable to political critique in at least two ways. First, the recognition that our conceptions of the good life and our desires for it can be contingent, socially mediated, ironic, and cruelly optimistic makes it possible to criticize and ameliorate the structures that create this misalignment between embedded social incentives and human flourishing. Of course, the mere fact that a source of unhappiness is contingent is not enough to show that it can be changed (where you were born, for example, is also a contingent fact.) And yet, there is value in showing that many of the sources of our sufferings are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces that could have been, have been, and perhaps should and still could be otherwise.
Second, critical pessimism questions the value of “our” contingent conceptions of and desires for the good life, and pushes us to justify them. “Life,” says Schopenhauer, “is a business that doesn’t cover the costs.” This general claim might also apply to the particular form of human life that we in the Global North participate in. Perhaps it would have been better, all things considered, had the particular configuration of human life we occupy never come into existence—not only for our own sake, but for the sake of those whose ways of life were erased, colonized, assimilated, or brutally truncated on the way to the often cruelly optimistic ideals of prosperity and comfort that so many of us strive for.
For example, North American indigenous peoples have long recognized that Euro-American settler colonialism was and is rapacious, involving vast, unsatisfiable hunger for ever-more resources, wealth, territory, and conquest, backed up by almost limitless dishonesty, cruelty, and brutality. Diné writer and activist John Redhouse explains that these violent desires were rooted in a “human condition” that was characteristic of the “ever advancing society of the West”:
“Wasi’chu is the Lakota (Sioux) word for ‘greedy one who takes the fat.’ It was used to describe a strange race that took not only what it thought it needed but also took the rest. Wasi’chu is also a human condition based on inhumanity, racism and exploitation. It is a sickness, a seemingly incurable and contagious disease which begot the ever advancing society of the West. If we do not control it, this disease will surely be the basis of what may be the last of the continuing wars against the Native American people.”
It is hard to read this passage and not immediately think of the many ways in which our current political, cultural, and economic systems reflect this condition of greed, “inhumanity, racism and exploitation.” What could those of us trapped in the condition of Wasi’chu know about human flourishing? In what ways are the Global North’s fantasies of the good life generated by the sort of lawless violence on which settler colonialism rests? Indeed, to what extent do they require that violence? How can we create material conditions for better understandings of the good life?
Pessimism tells the unvarnished bad news of human life, but it need not sputter out in self-indulgent defeatism. On the contrary, its attention to the ways in which modern life is contingently bad and degraded can spur what Michel Foucault described as his “hyper and pessimistic activism”—an awareness that things are bad, that our efforts to change them are by no means guaranteed to succeed, that there is no utopia possible in a world as bad as ours, but that we nevertheless have a responsibility to try to make the world a bit more conducive to everyone’s flourishing.
Patrick O'Donnell
Patrick O'Donnell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, IL. He has interests in philosophical pessimism, philosophy of race, and philosophy of language. He lives in Chicago with his wife, who is a graphic designer, educator, and organizer.
