The Historical Thesis

‘Progress’ across history might be measured in a number of ways. For instance, one might track progress by the advancement toward social, moral, political, or aesthetic ideals. The denial that significant progress in any of these respects is possible via advances in the sciences, education, technology, and social reforms stands in stark opposition to the optimistic spirit of Enlightenment thinking. But there are three possible versions of this claim that ought to be distinguished. The first holds that the seemingly numerous contingencies of human history are merely different manifestations of the same innate human condition. For reasons we shall come to see shortly, Schopenhauer’s idiosyncratic metaphysical framework leads him to explicitly endorse this version of the Historical Thesis. As he writes in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (WWR): “[t]he true philosophy of history consists in the insight that throughout all these endless alterations with their chaotic noise, we are only ever faced with the same, identical, unchangeable essence that behaves the same today as yesterday and always” (WWR2: 461). That history is static in this sense does not, in and of itself, entail a kind of pessimism (after all, if the state of the world is optimal, such continuity might be cause for celebration). Rather, the pessimistic import of this claim is derived from its combination with the less controversial thesis that the actual world is significantly sub-optimal in various ways. What the Historical Thesis entails is that attempts to realise our ideals are ultimately futile. We shall come to see that all self-proclaimed pessimists endorsed this view, though for varying reasons.

Another version of the Historical Thesis is the view that the collection of beliefs, values, and practices that make up a particular society’s ‘culture’ – or on stronger versions, across human civilisation broadly – has since degenerated from a now irretrievable ‘golden age’. Although overarching themes of cultural degeneracy are apparent in Wagner’s work, a large portion of the initial groundwork for this form of pessimism in German social thought was laid by the earlier romanticism of the eighteenth century, with its enthusiasm for antiquity and ancient Athens in particular. The efforts of the art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), for example, certainly cultivated an awe for Hellenism and an interpretation of it defined by the ideals of aesthetic sensitivity, splendour, creativity, and calmness – ideals that informed the Weimar classicism of Schiller and Goethe. However, the component of this cultural nostalgia that is characteristically ‘pessimistic’ is the idea that the identified ‘golden age’ is irretrievable for contemporary humanity. This cultural or social pessimism was a more explicit philosophical commitment in the intellectual sphere at the University of Basel in the mid to late nineteenth century, where it was developed by the historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) and the Swiss jurist and archaeologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), both of whom were influential interlocutors with Nietzsche during his Basel years. Burckhardt’s denial of social progress, for instance, was grounded in his observation that the modern progressive state follows a general cultural decline in Europe since the creative high point of the Italian Renaissance.Footnote ¹ The idea that humans could themselves direct history for the better, overcoming the feelings of alienation produced by various social and economic disharmonies, was, for Burckhardt, naive.Footnote ²

A third version of the Historical Thesis characteristically holds that further decline – be it moral, environmental, scientific, artistic, political, and so forth – is inevitable. Traces of this forward-looking ‘doomsayer’ pessimism can also be found in Burckhardt’s concerns about the combination of industrialisation and nationalism developing across nineteenth-century Europe, predicting (with unfortunate accuracy) a coming era of militarisation, “national wars and international competition”.Footnote ³ Eduard von Hartmann also clearly endorsed this thesis of decline with respect to some phenomena, if not all. For example, he anticipated that genius would continue to diminish, and mediocrity would flourish amidst an abundance of ever less original art, whose function would eventually decay into a mere temporary fix against lethargy. The result, Hartmann claimed, would be an artistic wasteland:

Contemporary versions of this ‘doomsayer’ pessimism might, for example, be found in concerns over the inability to avoid impending climate disaster, capitalism’s inability to sustain itself (combined with a view that alternative economic options are inferior), and the long-term ineffectiveness of nuclear deterrence.

The Modal Thesis

Popularised by Leibniz in the eighteenth century, ‘optimism’ is the view that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. Optimism is typically derived from a particular version of theism, according to which God’s benevolent and omnipotent nature entails that God could not fail to create an optimal universe, where optimal may be understood, for example, as the maximum amount of happiness compatible with supremely elegant physical laws. One modal version of pessimism is the reversal of this position. In one of Schopenhauer’s many inversions of a Leibnizian thesis, he famously considers “earnestly and honestly” a proof that this world “is in fact the worst of all possible worlds” (WWR2: 598), and qualifies ‘possible’ as not “what someone can dream up, but what really can exist and persist” (WWR2: 598).

Schopenhauer’s justification for the Modal Thesis involves harnessing a proto-fine-tuning hypothesis, according to which the existence of any life at all is dependent on precariously positioned variables. On the empirical grounds that even slight changes in the delicate conditions of the planet – atmospheric pressure, planetary orbits, the chemical composition of the air, species’ already meagre capacities for survival – would make life unviable, Schopenhauer concludes that “[t]he world is consequently as bad as it can possibly be, if it is to exist at all” (WWR2: 599). However, the vulnerabilities of Schopenhauer’s argument for the Modal Thesis are well known,Footnote ⁴ and since what is of philosophical interest about pessimism with respect to the aims of this book lies elsewhere, we shall not rehearse them here. It is an argument that he entertains only a significant time after he had already established his philosophical system; it does not come up in his writings again (unlike other pessimistic themes); and it is wholly independent of his reasons for defending the Historical, Eudaemonic, and Evaluative Theses.

Partly due to these vulnerabilities, the Modal Thesis is a version of pessimism that we find only Schopenhauer defending among the major professed pessimists of the nineteenth century. In her Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (PVG) of 1884, Olga Plümacher lamented the adoption of the term ‘pessimism’ to describe her philosophical camp in the dispute insofar as it misleadingly suggested the endorsement of the mere converse of Leibnizian optimism. As Plümacher rightly points out, the denial of the claim that the actual world is the best possible does not equate to the claim that the actual world is the worst possible. The position of most opponents to Leibnizian optimism was that while the world may be sub-optimal, it is nevertheless all-things-considered of positive value. The real debate, according to Plümacher, occurs at the level of this claim, which she labels ‘meliorism’ and defines explicitly as holding that “the world’s existence is to be affirmed [die Welt-existenz eine zu Bejahende]” and that “being is to be preferred to non-being [das Sein dem Nichtsein vorzuziehende sei]” (PVG: 2). Along with Hartmann and Schopenhauer (in his more careful moments), Plümacher aims to deny ‘meliorism’ and holds that this task does not require anything beyond understanding the (dis)value of existence in relative terms as a comparison between being and non-being. This form of pessimism will be discussed imminently.

To emphasise both the diversity of positions that could described as ‘pessimistic’ and the extent of the disagreements among self-proclaimed pessimists in the nineteenth century, it is worth mentioning yet another position on the Modal Thesis. Plümacher rejected this form of pessimism as deploying meaningless superlatives (PVG: 3–4), but while Hartmann agreed that Schopenhauer’s argument for it was a “manifest sophism” (PU, XIII: 12), he nevertheless had very different reasons for rejecting it. Not only did Hartmann retain the application of the superlative modal categories ‘best’ and ‘worst’, but he – a card-carrying pessimist – even agreed with Leibniz that the actual world is the best possible: “We have seen that in the existing world everything is arranged in the wisest and best manner, and that it may be looked upon as the best of all possible worlds, but that nevertheless it is thoroughly wretched, and worse than none at all” (PU, XIII: 125).

How could a pessimist accept the thesis most closely associated with optimism? While the metaphysical grounds for Hartmann’s ‘optimism’ here are both complex and dubious (see PU, XII: 356–368), they are not as inconsistent as it may first appear. To say that this is the best of all possible worlds is compatible with it being the most acceptable amongst a range of terrible options. Moreover, this is equally compatible with the view that the best possible world is still one in which it is not worth living.

The Eudaemonic Thesis

The claim that genuine happiness is impossible is a central feature of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. At present, this general formulation is compatible with a number of different claims. This ambiguity is deliberate, since this Eudaemonic Thesis is much more widely accepted in the history of philosophy than the Historical, Modal, or Evaluative Theses. For instance, if, like Schopenhauer, we understand ‘genuine’ to (at least partly) mean lasting, and ‘happiness’ to equate to the satisfaction of desires (Befriedigung), then the endorsement of the Eudaemonic Thesis can be found in traditions as diverse as Stoicism and Buddhism, and in the philosophies of Rousseau, Augustine, and Kant.Footnote ⁵ The latter is of especial interest, given (i) Kant’s significant influence on major players in the pessimism dispute and that (ii) Kant is not traditionally thought of as a pessimist in any sense.

Kant generally understands happiness in terms of the fulfilment of desires or inclinations. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he defines happiness as “the sum of satisfaction of all inclinations [Neigungen]” (G: 12), and later in the Critique of Practical Reason as “the state of a rational being in the world in the whole of whose existence everything goes according to his wish and will” (CPR: 104).Footnote ⁶ But Kant also holds that happiness is essentially “indeterminate” (G: 28) insofar as its content is highly variable across persons and is subject to rapid change. The unfortunate upshot of this is that because the capacity for wanting is infinite, humans never really know what it is that they want (G: 28). In the Critique of Judgement, Kant says much the same, describing happiness as an “unstable” (CJ: 297) concept, and that the nature of human beings is “not of the sort to call a halt anywhere in possession and enjoyment and to be satisfied” (CJ: 298).

Kant goes much further than simply considering desires to be inexhaustible. He also endorses the principle that desire implies pain. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), he writes that “[p]ain must proceed every gratification” and that pain is the “incentive to every activity” (APV: 131–132). Because of his endorsement of this principle, Kant also considers the satisfaction of desires (i.e., happiness) as the deliverance from pain, and thus essentially negative. Happiness, then, will always be something ‘beyond’, a future state we imagine: “To feel one’s life, to enjoy oneself, is then nothing else but to feel constantly impelled to pass beyond the present state (which, consequently, has to be a frequently recurring grief)” (APV: 133). It is for this reason that Kant describes inclinations or desires as “burdensome to a rational being” (CPR: 99).

Since, for Kant, genuine and lasting happiness is impossible, and striving for it a source of pain, he thinks that a life that is assessed in purely hedonic terms is bound to be valueless. Kant writes that any calculation about the value of existence made “merely by what one enjoys” is only ever going to be “less than zero”. He continues: “For who would start life anew under the same conditions … or even according to a new and self-designed plan … which would, however, still be aimed merely at enjoyment?” (CJ: 301). Four years earlier in the Speculative Beginning of Human History, Kant writes that “[o]ne must have a poor understanding of life’s true value if one can still wish that it should be longer than it actually is, for that would only prolong a permanent game of struggling with toil and trouble” (SB: 58).

As we shall find in this chapter, the parallels between Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s analysis of the nature of happiness are striking. In virtue of this, it is not wholly surprising that this could form the basis for an interpretation of Kant as a type of pessimist, a strategy that we shall come to see was invoked by Hartmann as part of a defence against attacks by neo-Kantians (see Section 2.3). Why pessimists like Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Plümacher, and others accepted the Eudaemonic Thesis – the claim that genuine happiness is impossible – will be elucidated in detail in the following section. Importantly, what distinguishes them from at least some of the traditions mentioned is that they took its truth to be a significant reason for accepting the Evaluative Thesis.

The Evaluative Thesis

As a result of increasing attention being paid to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, by the mid to late 1860s philosophical pessimism came to be more precisely defined and commonly understood as the negative answer to a fundamental philosophical question: ‘What is the value of life?’ or ‘Why continue living at all?’ Pessimism proper is the view that life is not worth living, that non-existence is preferable to existence, for everybody, in every circumstance. It is with this thesis that traditional philosophical enemies – materialists, neo-Kantians, positivists, theologians, and others – were unified in an attempt to refute or deflate. How does one estimate the value of life? Pessimism and optimism are both premised upon the claim that the ‘value of life’ is both a coherent concept and in principle knowable. These are both assumptions that we shall see Nietzsche eventually come to challenge, but it is important to specify exactly what is at stake between the pessimists and those who found life to be very much worth living, and perhaps even optimally good. Where only implicit in the work of the participants in the pessimism dispute, I shall attempt to do this in a partly reconstructive manner using contemporary terminology.

When one states that X’s life is good/bad, worth living/not worth living, better/worse than Y’s life, one is making a judgement about the total value of a subject’s existence. A life is worth living when its total value, all things considered, is positive (i.e., above zero). A life is not worth living when its total value, all things considered, is negative (i.e., below zero). The value in question has at least three pertinent characteristics: it is (1) final (i.e., valuable for its own sake, as opposed to instrumentally), (2) pro-tanto (i.e., always carries valence but is in principle defeasible), and (3) prudential (i.e., it is a benefit, or is good for an agent). For the pessimist and the optimist, the total value of a life is most commonly determined by its contents, that is, the sum of the goods attained that are thought to constitute one’s welfare. Popular candidates often include, for example, pleasure, preference-satisfaction, virtue, achievement, knowledge,; friendship, and so forth. The temporal distribution of these goods may also partly determine the value of life. For example, it seems at least plausible that a life that starts off extremely well but consistently declines over time is worse than the inverse type of life with the same sum total of value, where the life starts out horribly but consistently improves and peaks at its end.

However, it ought to be noted that since the generally considered end of the pessimism dispute at the beginning of the twentieth century, the total value of life has sometimes been thought explicitly to be the sum total of not just the contents of a life, but the contents in addition to the value that life itself has. On most versions of this view, the mere fact of being alive – or on more restricted versions of this view, a person’s life – has (final, pro-tanto, prudential) value, and accordingly, the scales that balance the value of a life all things considered are weighted towards the positive from the outset. Thomas Nagel, for example, writes:

If this view is correct, the pessimist has to show that the horrors of existence are sufficiently bad to outweigh the sum total of both the contents of a life plus life’s intrinsic goodness. While there are good reasons to be sceptical of life itself having positive valence,Footnote ⁸ the pessimists of the nineteenth century took life to be so bad that any positive value available to a person would pale in comparison to the negative.

Since the Evaluative Thesis was established as the de facto definition of pessimism from the beginning of Nietzsche’s published writing, and it was this thesis that he primarily responded to, I shall henceforth use the term ‘pessimism’ to refer exclusively to it, unless otherwise stated. I shall now aim to present and disentangle the reasons traditionally given in support of this brand of pessimism.

A ‘Metaphysical’ Argument

Metaphysical arguments for pessimism attempt to establish that the world ought not to be, that its non-existence is preferable to its existence, from observations about its essential nature. The most innovative of such arguments depends upon a distinctively Schopenhauerian understanding of its major premise: the world we experience is an inherently contradictory manifestation of its underlying singular essence as a blind, arational striving ‘Will’.Footnote ⁹ Fully appreciating this argument requires acknowledging the Kantian-inspired conceptual framework that Schopenhauer adopted, according to which the mind is not simply a passive receiver of data from the world around us, but rather mediates experience through the conceptual apparatus that make it possible in the first place. For Kant (and Schopenhauer), these are the a priori ‘forms of intuition’ of space and time, merely formal features of how we perceive objects, not things in themselves that exist independently of us. As a result, we are left with a double-aspect view of the world: how it appears or is represented to us – the world of phenomena – on the one hand, and the world as it is in-itself, unconditioned, on the other.

Unlike Kant, however, Schopenhauer holds that we can have ‘immediate’ (i.e., non-representational) knowledge of the thing in-itself, if only approximately, via consciousness of our own volitions (see WWR2: 208–209; WWR1, ‘Appendix’: 463, 536). The argument for this view is well known and, for our purposes, need not be rehearsed here. What is important is Schopenhauer’s claim that this introspective method reveals that what I am in essence is Will (Wille): I am an embodied being prone to wants and needs, a constant striving, ultimately to ensure the perpetuation of life (WWR1, §60: 353). From here, Schopenhauer comes to make the famous claim, and the subject of Book Two of WWR1, that the world is Will. In stark opposition to (what Schopenhauer interprets as) Kant’s claim that there is a plurality of things-in-themselves – a speculation forbidden by Kant’s own framework, according to Schopenhauer – he defends a strict ontological monism in which Wille zum Leben, or ‘will to life’, is the essence of everything in the phenomenal world. What we experience are merely manifestations of this purposeless, blind, arational striving force or ‘Will’, individuated by the a priori forms of space and time. This Will “which is objectified in human life as it is every appearance, is a striving without aim or end [ein Streben ohne Ziel und ohne Ende]” (WWR1, §58: 347). The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) – the principle that there is no fact or truth that lacks a sufficient reason why it should be so, and not otherwise – is, relative to its pre-Kantian status in metaphysics, now demoted to a merely regulative principle within the phenomenal world of experience: “The principle of sufficient reason explains the connections between appearances, but not the appearances themselves. So philosophy cannot use these principles to search for either an efficient cause or a final cause of the world as a whole” (WWR1, §15: 108).

In Books Two and Four of WWR1 – and continued in the 1838 On the Will in Nature – Schopenhauer sets out to elucidate the nature of phenomenal manifestations of the Will. He finds that as Will, each organism embodies conflict, both within itself and with other competing manifestations of Will. There are two symptoms of this “internal rupture [Entzweiung mit sich selbst] that is essential to the will” (WWR1, §27: 171) to which Schopenhauer points in order to substantiate the claim that phenomenal existence is inherently contradictory.

The first symptom can be recognised, Schopenhauer argues, in the data afforded by the hard sciences. We soon realise that humans, animals, plants, and even non-organic entities in the fields of chemistry and magnetism are subjects of conflict, growing, and striving: “everywhere in nature we see contest, we see struggle, we see victory changing hands” (WWR1, §27: 171). In strikingly Darwinian-sounding passages, Schopenhauer explains how the conflicted nature of the Will is most clearly observed at the grade of objectification in the animal kingdom, where each individual animal is either the prey or rival of some other. He offers examples from lower down the scale of wasp species that lay their eggs in the larvae of other insects, and “the first thing the hatching brood does is to slowly destroy the larvae as they emerge” (WWR1, §27: 172), all the way up to the vicious fight for survival between the greater mammals (e.g., WWR2: 369–370). His most vivid example of inherent conflict in phenomenal manifestations of Will is afforded by the bulldog ant of Australia: “when cut in half, the tail and the head begin to fight: the head attacks the tail with its teeth and the tail bravely defends itself by stinging the head: the fight usually takes about half an hour until they die or are dragged off by other ants” (WWR1, §27: 172). As he writes:

This universal strife is necessarily how the Will manifests itself: “the will to life must devour its own flesh because in the world of appearance nothing at all exists besides it, and it is a hungry will; hence the hierarchy of its appearances, each of which lives at the expense of the other” (PP2, §173). The inherent contradiction of the phenomenal world is, then, partly grounded in the reality that the phenomena that are in vicious competition with each other to survive are manifestations of the same Will.

A second way in which the phenomenal manifestation of the Will illustrates an internal tension or contradiction, Schopenhauer argues, is in the subordination of the individual will-to-life to that of the species. The metaphysics of sexual impulses betrays how nature seeks a surplus of ‘life’ – ever more manifestations of the Will – and attains this via “implanting a certain delusion [Wahn] in the individual that makes what in truth is good only for the species appear to be good for the individual”, all the while consciously believing that “he is serving himself” (WWR2: 554). The idea is that humans and animals exist with particularly dominant sexual instincts, yet while these appear to the individual as prudentially driven, they are simply a deceptive means of propagating these species as a whole, effecting a greater manifestation of the Will. This is an insight that Darwin explicitly approved of, citing Schopenhauer on this point in chapter 20 of The Descent of Man in 1871.

It might be tempting to ground the ‘metaphysical’ argument for pessimism in the first step taken in this story: the Kantian distinction between how the world appears to us and how it really is in-itself. Because the world we experience is our representation and is ontologically subordinate to the world in-itself as purposeless Will, it is imbued with a sense of emptiness or vanity (Nichtigkeit) and illusoriness (Scheinbarkeit), characteristic of an “insubstantial dream” or “ghostly phantasm” (luftgebilde) (WWR1, §17: 123). However, while illusoriness or ontological dependence may be a necessary condition for pessimism, it is not immediately clear how it could be a sufficient condition. That, it seems, would require additional and robust epistemic-axiological premises that Schopenhauer does not explicitly defend. As Sebastian Gardner notes: “life’s dream-likeness does not of itself make life a bad dream or a dream that ought not to be dreamt”.Footnote ¹⁰ Rather, pessimism is arrived at in the following way.

As we have already noted, Schopenhauer’s Kantian commitments mean that the PSR is off the table as a means of justifying or endowing a meaning to the world and its contents. Instead, the principle applies ubiquitously within the world of experience, and cannot apply to the Will:

For Schopenhauer, the relation between the world as it is in-itself and the world of experience is not causal; rather, the two are sides of the same coin: they are the same reality, considered from different perspectives. But as manifestations of the Will in the world we experience, every being is individuated: the PSR governs a phenomenal reality structured a priori by space, time, and causality in which there appear to be a plurality of wills. It is this individuation (principium individuationis) that, as discussed in the ways earlier, leads to the strife and vicious conflict amongst manifestations of the Will, and is itself an “expression of the contradiction [der Ausdruck des Widerspruchs] that afflicts the will to life from within” (WWR1, §61: 359; cf. §69: 425).Footnote ¹¹ This explains Schopenhauer’s description of “every individuality” as a “special error, a misstep” (WWR2: 508).

It is this understanding of the world as a meaningless conflict – a “burlesque distortion” and “irreconcilable dissonance” (PP2, §156: 271) – that substantiates pessimism. While this contradictory and endless striving gives rise, among sentient creatures, to great suffering and pain (as the next section explores), this fact is not itself what grounds pessimism according to the ‘metaphysical’ argument. Rather, it is what that suffering is indicative of: the essential irrationality and contradictoriness of phenomenal existence. As Schopenhauer writes: “The character of things of this world, namely the human world, is not so much imperfection, as is often claimed, but rather distortion in things moral, intellectual, physical, in everything” (PP2, §156a: 274).

Nevertheless, as we shall see, the ‘metaphysical’ argument was not the argument that primarily occupied the attention of combatants with the pessimism dispute of the mid to late nineteenth century. While a version of it was defended in the 1880s by Julius Bahnsen in his Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt (WWW), the debate typically focused upon the attempt to defend pessimism on the grounds of the essential ubiquity of suffering.

‘Hedonic’ Arguments

Hedonic pessimism, in its most general form, is comprised of just two components:

• Descriptive Component: Life’s suffering essentially outweighs life’s pleasures.

• Evaluative Component: Life is not worth living; non-existence is preferable to existence.

Both of these claims were endorsed by the majority of the proponents of pessimism in the nineteenth century. In chapter 46 of WWR2, Schopenhauer successively expresses a clear commitment to each component:

Similarly, Hartmann plainly endorses the descriptive component in his claim that “pain not only preponderates in the world in general to a high degree, but also in each single individual, even him who is placed in the most favourable circumstances conceivable” (PU, XI: 76), and endorses the evaluative component shortly afterwards: “The remit of individual life is, then, that all is surrendered; that, as the Preacher sees, ‘All is vanity’, i.e. illusory, worthless” (PU, XIII: 78). Plümacher, too, characterises and subscribes to pessimism as the view that “the sum of displeasure outweighs the sum of pleasure; consequently the non-being of the world would be better than its being [die Summe der Unlust überwiegt die Summe der Lust; folglich wäre das Nichtsein der Welt besser als deren Sein]” (PVG: 1). This same view is echoed by Philipp Mainländer in his 1876 Die Philosophie der Erlösung (PE: 467).

But a tacit assumption needs to be made explicit if the evaluative component is to be justified by the descriptive component. In order to have a valid argument, we must reveal the suppressed premise stating the truth of hedonism: the view that pleasure is the only intrinsic good, and suffering the only intrinsic bad. For some proponents of this argument (i.e., Schopenhauer), this premise remains a tacit assumption, while for others (i.e., Hartmann, Plümacher, Mainländer, Taubert) it is made explicit. Following Hartmann, Plümacher, for instance, is explicit in taking pleasure and pain to be the sole measure of life’s worth: “Only the eudaimonological criterion is decisive for the value or disvalue of the world’s existence, it is something final which we cannot surpass, and all other criteria must be in accord with it” (PVG: 137). Since the entirety of Chapter 7 will address the role of hedonism in establishing philosophical pessimism, and Nietzsche’s critique of this role, I shall grant its truth for now. Instead, it will be worthwhile in this section to elucidate the different ways in which pessimists sought to substantiate the descriptive component.

The thesis that life’s suffering outweighs life’s pleasures can been defended on both a posteriori and a priori grounds. The former strategy involves harnessing abundant empirical evidence of suffering and misery as a means of tipping the hedonic scales toward the negative. Such evidence may include human-induced horrors: the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, the Holocaust, persecution and torment under the Spanish Inquisition, the widespread sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church, the billions of animals bred for slaughter or exploitation as a result of profit-driven industrial farming. The evidence may also include the horrors of the natural world: the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 and the deadly spread of AIDS and malaria, to take but a minuscule sample of the world’s cruelty. Alternatively, the a priori strategy for establishing the descriptive component of pessimism takes the relations between the concepts of pleasure, satisfaction, suffering, and striving to be such that they do not allow for a hedonic net-positive to ever arise. This type of argument is not a modern development, but, as we shall see shortly, has recognisable antecedents in Epicurean and Stoic traditions. It is crucial to note as a preliminary, however, that while pessimists have historically offered both types of argument to establish the descriptive component of pessimism, they have also often given principled reasons for a reluctance to rest their case entirely on either the a priori strategy, as in the case of some, or entirely on the a posteriori strategy, as in the case of others. To best elucidate these reasons for divergent methodologies, it will be worthwhile to briefly compare the respective approaches of Schopenhauer and Hartmann.

In each volume of WWR, Schopenhauer describes numerous empirical cases of misery in characteristically evocative terms. Indeed, exposure to vivid depictions of life’s miseries is very often where his pessimism can appear the most alluring. In a typical passage of this nature, Schopenhauer claims that honest reflection upon the reality will lead to exactly this:

Schopenhauer is no less attentive to the systematic suffering inherent to the natural world. In a well-known passage, Schopenhauer recalls the experience of the German-Dutch botanist and geologist Franz Junghuhn during his time in Java:

Schopenhauer frequently offers such cases. Nevertheless, in WWR1, §59, he is explicit that the empirical case for pessimism ought to function only as an auxiliary supplement to his a priori argument(s), that is, as a means of harnessing the psychological impact of confronting concrete cases of suffering to “arouse a much more vivid conviction” (WWR1, §59: 349) in the thesis, already established, that life is not worth living. The justification for this strategy, I argue, resides in an eagerness to avoid two objections to pessimism that eventually became commonplace:

1. (1) That any current preponderance of suffering over pleasure is a product of contingent social circumstance, and leaves open the possibility of future social progress.

2. (2) That pessimism is merely reducible to one’s psychological disposition or mood.

A purely empirical case for pessimism could at best offer a relatively mild inductive argument, according to which the preponderance of suffering in the world now and in the past gives us reason to think that future circumstances of life will be the same. But for Schopenhauer this is unsatisfactory, and would amount to a “simple declamation over human misery” (WWR1, §59: 350). This vulnerability was articulated most clearly by the psychologist James Sully in his critique of pessimism in 1877: “even if the pessimists succeed in showing that the world, as it has hitherto existed, is an appalling excess of misery, there remains the question whether this balance is a fixed quantity, or whether it may be indefinitely reduced, and even transformed into a positive remainder of good” (PHC: 357).

Since Schopenhauer intends his pessimism to run deeper than a mere commentary upon contemporary states of affairs, and instead seeks to establish the ubiquity of suffering independent of contingent social circumstance, he takes a priori argument to be necessary in defending its descriptive component.

Schopenhauer also anticipated that resting the case for pessimism solely on balancing endless empirical data would lend itself to item (2) above: the charge of psychological bias or “one-sidedness” (WWR1, §59: 350). The attempt to collapse pessimism as a philosophical view in this way became a primary strategy in the pessimism dispute from the 1870s onwards, with Nietzsche launching a version of it himself in his later writings (see Chapter 5). However, Schopenhauer is adamant that pessimism is philosophically justifiable when “starting out from the universal and demonstrating a priori” (WWR1, §59: 350) that the suffering of life will always outweigh its pleasure.

Interestingly, Hartmann is motivated by the very same concern as Schopenhauer: to avoid objections (1) and (2). However, contra Schopenhauer, Hartmann takes an “inductive” and empirical method to be the correct means of doing so. Hartmann’s conception of “induction” here is broad, and simply expresses a commitment to the intelligibility of experience via the principles of the empirical sciences and inference to the best explanation. Part of Hartmann’s justification for a primarily empirical approach is his conviction that Schopenhauer’s a priori argument contains significant flaws that, consequently, leaves him open to speculations about the psychological origins of his pessimism. To appreciate these divergent methods, it is necessary to first present Schopenhauer’s a priori argument.

Schopenhauer’s a priori argument for the descriptive component of pessimism has received a significant amount of critical attention in the secondary literature.Footnote ¹² It will suffice for the purposes of our investigation to simply outline its basic commitments. It begins from a minimalistic account of human nature: as essentially embodied beings, it is fundamental to the human condition to be prone to needs and wants, and to strive to satisfy them. For living things, as manifestations of the will-to-life, it is the striving (streben) to satisfy needs and wants that is the essence of life, and not any final need or want (WWR1, §56: 335). Expressive of this striving is each organism’s unchosen disposition to direct itself towards self-preservation and reproduction (WWR1, §60: 353).

From here, the argument for the thesis that life’s suffering (always) outweighs life’s pleasures proceeds via four steps. First, like Kant, Schopenhauer conceives of happiness (Glück) in terms of the satisfaction (Befriedigung) of desires: “the achievement of [the will’s] goal is satisfaction, contentment, happiness” (WWR1, §56: 336). But, since we are in essence striving beings, there is no ultimate or final satisfaction. Any achievement of our goals quickly brings a fresh episode of willing, hence ‘happiness’ as a lasting phenomenon is intrinsically elusive. One of the upshots of this conception of ever-regenerating desires is that happiness is more easily remembered or expected than it is experienced in the present. Schopenhauer holds that it is because of our disposition to perpetually strive that, unlike pain (which can persist indefinitely with relatively stable intensity), positive feelings associated with happiness as satisfaction swiftly fade, and never reflect their anticipated significance: happiness “always lies in the future, or in the past, and the present is like a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunlit plains: both in front of it and behind it everything is bright, it alone casts a constant shadow” (WWR2: 588).

However, this insatiability is not sufficient to establish that life’s sufferings will always outweigh life’s pleasures. Crucial to the argument is a second step that defends a particular analysis of the phenomenal quality of striving, according to which it is intrinsically tied to two specific kinds of pain. According to Schopenhauer, striving – that is, the determined pursuit of a goal – occurs because the agent experiences a lack (Mangel) or need (Bedürftigkeit): “All striving comes from lack, from a dissatisfaction with one’s condition” (WWR1, §56: 336); “all willing [wollen] as such comes from want” (WWR1, §65: 390). The experience of a lack, Schopenhauer claims, is a painful one: “the basis of all willing is need, lack, and thus pain” (WWR1, §57: 338); the “great violence of willing is already immediately and in and of itself a constant source of suffering … because all willing as such comes from want, and thus from suffering” (WWR1, §65: 390; cf. §38). While this pain (Schmerz) is often physical (as in the case of hunger or thirst), Schopenhauer tends to emphasise its mental manifestations via unease or discomfort in yearning. But as well as there being a degree of pain that causes us to strive, Schopenhauer holds that the experience of resistance to one’s goal that is intrinsic to striving is how suffering is defined: “When an obstacle is placed between [the will] and its temporary goal, we call this inhibition suffering” (WWR1, §56: 336). This second kind of pain – suffering from frustrated resistance – is essential to the argument, for simply acknowledging that pain is required to provoking striving would otherwise be compatible with that striving as being, on the whole, an amply pleasurable experience.

Schopenhauer should not be interpreted here as claiming that every episode of striving is severe agony. This would be erroneous, given that there are many telic activities in which it is in virtue of a drawn-out struggle that people pleasurably pursue a goal – sports, crossword puzzles, video games, mountaineering, and so forth – a fact Schopenhauer himself acknowledges (WWR1, §55: 332; PP1, §6: 385–386). Some commentators have taken this to show that Schopenhauer’s argument relies upon a fatal ambiguity, taking the ‘dissatisfaction’ inherent to striving as a verbal slider that carries with it connotations of suffering into a context in which it is normally absent.Footnote ¹³ But this misconstrues Schopenhauer’s commitment to the principle that so long as we strive, we suffer. His point is that all striving by nature involves some amount of painfully felt frustration, a frustration that all too easily grows in degree relative to the amount of prolonged resistance to attainment. Moreover, as Schopenhauer points out, our episodes of striving are not isolated events, but occur simultaneously in vast legions, some of which conflict with one another: “For every wish that is fulfilled, at least ten are left denied” (WWR1, §38: 219). With this is mind, it is the striving being as a whole that is to be taken into consideration; the amalgamation of ever-regenerating and unchosen pursuits that are in everyday circumstances distributed across “a hundred little bouts of moodiness and depression” (WWR1, §57: 343).Footnote ¹⁴

The model examples Schopenhauer gives in support of this twofold connection between pain and striving are of that of nutrition and reproduction, that is, hunger, thirst, and sex. These ‘natural’ desires – being most basic to human survival – are frequently regenerative and their frustration is most clearly associated with pain. But Schopenhauer, following Epicurean and Stoic traditions, is attentive to how this cycle of craving, striving, and suffering pertains no less to ‘artificial’ desires generated by social relations and convention, that is, wealth, prestige, friendship, influence, and power (PP1, §6: 289–290). Such desires are also arguably more prevalent in the twenty-first century than they were in Schopenhauer’s day. Not only has global capitalism reached a stage where there is a seemingly endless stream of products available for purchase – products that the advertising industry is solely dedicated to convincing us we need – but the world today is significantly more interconnected. The artificial need for prestige in particular, and its accompanying anxiety, is, Schopenhauer would have surely observed, amplified exponentially by the phenomenon of social media (see PP1, §6: 303–304).

But things get worse. A third step in the argument concerns the nature of the state of attainment. Although, on Schopenhauer’s view, life is a series of episodes of (predominantly failed) striving to satisfy desires, we sometimes do get what we want, and sometimes without struggle. At least for a short while before new desires arise, there seems to be freedom from suffering. But Schopenhauer then makes the following move:

The claim here is that if one lacks objects of willing to strive towards – for example, if desires are satisfied too easily, or few objects stir one’s sustained interest – then one falls victim to additional torment: boredom. For Schopenhauer, “Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face” (WWR1, §57: 339), citing “Philadelphia’s strict penitentiary system”, whose practice of solitary confinement “makes boredom into an instrument of punishment”, often resulting in driving “convicts to suicide” (WWR1, §57: 340). In this case, at least part of the pain inflicted upon the inmates is in giving them just enough to stay alive, but denying them any objects of interest to pursue.Footnote ¹⁵ The profound effect boredom has on the human psyche is evidenced by the extreme ways it can drive people to (1) “the greatest licentiousness” of excess and (2) anarchy (WWR1, §57: 339–340). The first – which we might call ‘the Boredom of Croesus’ – is the typical means the affluent have to deflect the pain of boredom. Schopenhauer writes:

The affluent have the means of too often achieving their ends with ease, and Schopenhauer takes this to explain the tremendous excess these societies produce as attempts to distract from boredom: “hence luxury, delicacies, tobacco, opium, alcoholic liquors, pomp, display, and all that goes with this” (PP2, §153: 265; cf. WWR1, §57: 340). While the world’s poorest suffer in striving to meet their needs, the world’s richest – the “world of fashion” – suffer from their trivial wants and lack of sustained interests.

The second coping mechanism for boredom Schopenhauer gives – ‘anarchy’, or what we might call ‘the Boredom of Nero’ – is, more specifically, violence and malice. Such is the need for something to strive towards in order to keep us occupied that it often provokes humans to “pick a quarrel, hatch a plot, or get [themselves] involved in fraud and all sorts of depravities, only to put an end to the unbearable state of peace” (PP1, §6: 386; PP2, §152: 264). How might this happen? Schopenhauer refers to a process of strain-relief whereby if the “excessive pressure of the will” cannot be released because there are no goals to pursue, or the goals available are achieved too easily, then in order to avoid “the most horrible desolation” and “eternal unrest” of boredom, one “will try to mitigate his own sufferings through the sight of other people’s” (WWR1, §65: 391).

Both examples – excess and cruelty – motivate Schopenhauer to refer to boredom as a type of lack or “empty longing” (WWR1, §58: 347): even though we suffer in striving, we need to strive in order to escape the pain of boredom.Footnote ¹⁶ This framework places the human experience between inevitable and diametric episodes of affliction, an exhausting and endless oscillation in which “life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom; in fact, these are the ingredients out of which it is ultimately composed” (WWR1, §57: 338). This analysis of the intrinsic phenomenal quality of human activity and inactivity as primarily characterised by unease and perturbation allows Schopenhauer to claim that the hedonic scales are weighted, a priori, towards the negative, that life’s suffering will very likely outweigh life’s pleasures.

As dire as this situation sounds, a fourth and final step that completes Schopenhauer’s argument is to block the optimist’s channel of recourse. It is evident that sometimes we do achieve our goals. The pessimist must therefore (1) avoid denying such pleasures ever occur or (2) avoid wholly ignoring them in their hedonic calculations. Schopenhauer is quite aware of this, and attempts to deflate the concern in the following way:

Again following the Epicureans – as well as Kant (see Section 1.1) – a logical precondition of happiness is want or desire, but attainment (happiness) is then more appropriately described as relief from painful striving rather than gratifying in-itself: “we never gain anything more than liberation” from desire (WWR1, §58: 345–346, emphasis mine). Call this the Negativity Thesis. Schopenhauer later expresses the thesis in the following way:

Schopenhauer goes on to offer the “three greatest goods in life” – health, youth, and freedom – as examples that operate on this basis: we only register them phenomenally in their absence, and they offer no positive hedonic value when obtained. This formulation of the thesis in WWR2: 590 is ambiguous, however, given that the claim that (1) ‘pleasures are never positively felt’ is neither equivalent to nor entailed by the claim that (2) ‘pleasures are conditional upon the extinguishing of pre-existing pain’. Both claims are controversial, to say the least, but Schopenhauer tends to run them together. The intention, I take it, is to argue, again contra Leibniz, that the pleasure of satisfaction is exclusively in the cessation of a pain (see PP2, §149: 263). The philosophical import of this commitment is that the hedonic scales are, from the start, lopsided, and at best could only ever return to net zero in principle.Footnote ¹⁷

Despite Schopenhauer’s frequent balancing of happiness and suffering, in the end he seems to take the Negativity Thesis to render to the practice “besides the point” (WWR2: 591). In characteristically mercantile terms, Schopenhauer writes:

Nevertheless, Schopenhauer seems to allow that some pleasures can come ‘unbidden’; that is, they do not depend upon a pre-existing desire, for example, the unexpected smell of freshly cut grass on a summer’s walk, “purely intellectual pleasures”, or conscious awareness of our causal powers (see WWR1, §58: 340; §55: 332). But such is the volatile and fleeting nature of these pleasures, as well as their relative infrequency and diminishing returns, that they are unlikely to significantly affect the hedonic balance.Footnote ¹⁸ In anticipation of what contemporary psychologists refer to as the ‘law of hedonic asymmetry’,Footnote ¹⁹ Schopenhauer explicitly draws attention to this point: “Our sensitivity for pain is almost infinite, while that for pleasure has narrow limits” (PP2, §148: 309). While apparently recognising the existence of some positive pleasures then, Schopenhauer takes their asymmetrical relation to pain to hardly threaten the pessimist’s estimation of life: “Whoever would like to briefly test the assertion that pleasure outweighs pain in the world, or that they are at least in equilibrium, should compare the feelings of the animal that devours another with those of the one being devoured” (PP2, §149: 263).

In conjunction with the previously presented claims that (1) striving is inherently painful; (2) boredom is inherently painful; and (3) the will is restless and insatiable, the Negativity Thesis leads Schopenhauer to conclude, famously, that “life is a business that does not cover the costs” (WWR2: 574). This completed argument, if sound, entails that suffering is not merely an accidental feature of life that one might eradicate, but a fundamental feature of what it means to exist as an embodied being. The human predicament is tragic, for our psycho-physiology is such that we are not equipped with the means to attain the constituents of our own well-being:

While some appear well-off in virtue of their relative health and financial advantages, for example, this is superficial: as essentially striving beings they too are caught in the endless cycle of restless frustration, even if its channels differ. While Schopenhauer can (and does) consistently allow that the alleviation of some suffering is possible,Footnote ²⁰ the idea so fundamental to Enlightenment thinking that suffering might be a problem that could be eradicated through increases in wealth or social engineering is a myth he is keen to dispel:

Schopenhauer’s a priori argument for pessimism was certainly influential in the pessimism dispute, but it was not the only hedonic argument given in support of the thesis, nor was it the one that gained the most notoriety.

One of the primary criticisms of Schopenhauer’s argument came from the later pessimists themselves. While they agreed with his conclusion that life could not be worth living given the amount of suffering there is in the world, they were concerned that Schopenhauer’s Negativity Thesis was not the best means of defending it, vulnerable as it is to counter-examples. Hartmann (PU, XIII: 13–14), Plümacher (PVG: 3), and Mainlander (PE: 467) all attack the Negativity Thesis on these grounds. Hartmann, for example, writes, “I do not in the least intend to dispute that every removal or diminution of a pain is a pleasure, but not every pleasure is a removal or diminution of a pain” (PU, XIII: 13), and offers as examples the positive pleasures of “hope” (PU, XIV: 72), sexual gratification “taken as purely physical” (PU, XIII: 14), and “the enjoyments of agreeable taste and those of art and science” (PU, XIII: 14). By including artistic pleasures, Hartmann makes a clear departure from Schopenhauer’s conception of aesthetic experience as pleasure in the cessation of willing – something Hartmann considers incoherent (PU, XIII: 14).

There are certainly question marks over the strength of this objection. As we noted, it is not quite fair to say that Schopenhauer outright denied the existence of ‘positive pleasures’, but rather, in his more careful moments, he deemed them to be few and far between, and of such insignificance compared with pains that they would barely affect the hedonic balance. But Hartmann comes to endorse only what he interprets to be a distinctive, weaker version of the Negativity Thesis, according to which some of the goods in life – albeit some of the most important: health, freedom, and security – are not positively felt. He takes this weaker version, however, to place a large dent in the case for the descriptive component of pessimism. So how does Hartmann’s hedonic argument attempt to fill this gap and improve upon Schopenhauer’s?

It is worth mentioning at the outset why Hartmann’s criticisms and his version of the hedonic argument warrant consideration. When his Philosophie des Unbewussten was first published in 1869, it generated so much controversy in German intellectual circles – provoking hundreds of reviews, critical responses, articles, and books – that it was Hartmann who became the face of pessimism from the 1870s onwards, and not Schopenhauer. Hartmann’s system undertook the mammoth task of attempting to reconcile Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the Wille with Hegel’s historical Weltprozess, in which over time mankind becomes increasingly conscious of the teleological character of human freedom. At various points in this monograph, the many tensions in this extravagant metaphysical project will become apparent. As we shall see, they provoked Nietzsche’s sharpest rebukes, but also attracted his sustained philosophical attention. But for our present aims, it is enough to say that Hartmann takes each individual human life to be one characterised by misery and suffering, simply a cog in a historical machine that pays no concern to the happiness of each person within it. His inductive method leads him to harness the following claims as evidence.

1. (1) Both pleasure and pain can be positively felt, but their conceptual relation “tells in favour of pain” (PU, XIII: 13): pleasure and pain, Hartmann tells us, “attack the nervous system”, and because of this the longer they go on they each “produce a kind of fatigue [Ermüdung], which, with the highest degree of pleasure, may become fatal atony” (PU, XIII: 13; cf. PVG: 138). The point here is not obvious, but I take the claim to be that both the pain and the pleasure a subject may experience produce a painfully felt need for their cessation the more they continue. Pains are felt twice over: we feel the original pain (e.g., a toothache) plus fatigue, which involves a prolonged desire for the original pain to cease. In the case of pleasures, the longer they heighten our sensation the duller, more banal, and tiresome they become as our exhaustion works against the original delightful sensation, reducing our overall experience to one of apathy at best. As Hartmann puts it: “Pain is … the more painful, pleasure the more indifferent and cloying, the longer it lasts” (PU, XIII: 13).

It is worth noting that Hartmann’s point here seems to have been anticipated by David Hume – one of Schopenhauer’s philosophical heroes – who astutely observed in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that

Hartmann does not acknowledge this anticipation of his view in Hume. Nevertheless, his argument in support of the descriptive component of pessimism, as we can now see, hinges upon Hume’s claim here: it is not the case that all pleasure is merely the cessation of a painful desire. Rather, where positive pleasures are possible, they are almost always accompanied by an even greater quantity of pains. None of these pains are ever adequately compensated for by the brief pleasure that is sought after. Maintaining the mercantile language of Schopenhauer, Hartmann therefore asserts: “The world accordingly resembles a money-lottery: the appointed pains one must pay in full, but the gains one receives only with a deduction” (PU, XIII: 22).

1. (2) Another observation Hartmann offers is that desires for social goods such as wealth, love, power, honour, respect, and fame – as well as being accompanied by overcompensating pains of the kinds described in (1) – are boundless. Not only do they have no intrinsic limit, but our desires for them are incremental: the more we acquire, the greater the desire for them becomes, not weaker. As a result, the harder it becomes (and the less likely one is) to satisfy one’s desires. Let us call this the Insatiability Thesis.

The Insatiability Thesis was by no means a new discovery by Hartmann. We have already seen that Schopenhauer endorses it, and in doing so he follows in the footsteps of Montaigne, Hobbes, and Rousseau. There are two ways pain is allegedly related to this thesis. Because we can never be assured that we have ‘enough’ power, wealth, fame, and so forth, we attempt to procure as much as we can: “the more one drinks of it, the thirstier one becomes” (PU, XIII: 56). While this perpetual pursuit is a source of great frustration, there are also the social effects of each individual’s competitive interests in such goods. Hartmann’s distinction between ‘subjective honour’ and ‘objective honour’ makes this point clear: the former denotes our own estimation of self-worth; the latter denotes the general estimation of one’s worth by others (PU, XIII: 49–56). Because people typically take the latter to be a serious matter, it creates rivalry, conflict, and struggle. As Hobbes noted, it is all too easy for such competition over glory, fame, and power to descend into “contention, enmity, and war”.Footnote ²² Consequently, of these types of good, Hartmann concludes that overall “they procure for him who is possessed by them a thousand times more pain than pleasure” (PU, XIII: 52).

1. (3) A third claim Hartmann makes to defend the descriptive component of pessimism is that humans are far more affected by painful experiences than they are by pleasurable ones, even where they appear equal in intensity and duration. We have already discussed two types of hedonic asymmetry that Schopenhauer, and Hartmann, accepted:

   1. (i) (Most) pleasures are felt negatively – as a relief from suffering – whereas pains are positively felt.

   2. (ii) Positive pleasures tend to be less intense and shorter in duration than overall pains.

But Hartmann also endorses a third hedonic asymmetry expressed in (3): our sensitivity to pain far outstrips our sensitivity to pleasure. Hartmann gives the following example:

1. (4) A final point Hartmann makes is that suffering increases with greater intelligence and cognitive ability. This claim is expressed in Ecclesiastes: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow [Qui auget scientiam, auget et dolorem]”. Hartmann says that “higher sensibility sufficiently explains why men of genius are so much more unhappy in their lives than ordinary men, to which must be added (at least among reflective geniuses) the penetration of most illusions” (PU, XIII: 77). Consider hope, for example: while Hartmann grants that it is indeed “a very real pleasure”, he thinks that because of the illusive nature of happiness, hope is a “contradiction and worthless”, an “illusion” whose “function is just to dupe us … in order only that we may endure to perform our yet uncomprehended task”. The problem is that once a person has made use of science and philosophy to acquire the conviction that this is the case, it undercuts the basis for its pleasurable nature: they “very soon find [their] instinct of hope enfeebled and depressed by this cognition of understanding” (PU, XIII: 72–73).

The idea that more complex cognitive abilities increase the capacity for suffering was expressed by many in the nineteenth century, not all of them pessimists. John Stuart Mill, for example, noted the same general correlation: “A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type.”Footnote ²³ Mill, however, thought that higher faculties also open the door to more complex and substantial kinds of pleasures that can offset these deeper pains. In adopting the stronger claim that there is general correlation between gradations in intelligence and aggregate decreases in well-being, Hartmann is again allied with Schopenhauer, who states the idea clearly: “An increase in pain is directly correlated with an increase in clarity of cognition and an increase in consciousness; consequently, pain reaches its highest pitch in human beings, and even there continues to grow in proportion to cognition and intelligence; the man in whom genius dwells suffers the most” (WWR1, §56: 336; cf. §58). Since both Hartmann (and Schopenhauer) sensibly do not deny that greater cognitive capacities also enable greater pleasures – for example, of the arts and sciences – this indicates that part of what explains the truth of (4) is dependent upon the credibility of (1)–(3).

From this survey of Hartmann’s multifaceted hedonic argument for pessimism, we can determine that his dispute with Schopenhauer ultimately looks less serious than he makes it out to be. Schopenhauer endorses (2)–(4); Schopenhauer’s Negativity Thesis is not as strong as Hartmann proposes; Hartmann’s commitment to (1) is a genuine philosophical difference, but as he notes will “practically yield almost the same result as the theory of Schopenhauer” (PU, XIII: 18; cf. 14). Further still, Hartmann seems to deploy a priori reasoning in (1) – through a conceptual analysis of pleasure’s relation to pain – which is to be reinforced with empirical observation, a method we saw Schopenhauer explicitly endorse (WWR1, §59: 349).Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century it was Hartmann’s presentation of the argument that was perceived to be the most credible, and up to date with the emerging empirical sciences.

Hedonic arguments for pessimism continue, however, to strike many as incredible. Even though one might accept the axiological condition that life would fall short of being worth living if suffering essentially outweighed pleasure, many might find it hard to seriously entertain the idea that it does, on account of very strong intuitions to the contrary. Life, for most, feels to be very much worth living, and happiness something readily attainable. Hartmann anticipates this point, and, building upon Schopenhauer’s psychological observations, offers a debunking explanation for this optimism, revealing the systematic causes for it. He begins by noting the difficulty in determining the hedonic value of life from an appropriate average standard:

The passage contains a number of distinct points, but particularly interesting is his identification of certain unconscious biases that can distort our own evaluations. One such bias, Hartmann contends, is the unconscious will’s drive toward self-preservation. The love of life and to persist in it “is nothing else but the instinctive impulse of self-preservation” (PU, XIII: 9), which in consequence makes “our judgement on the algebraic sum of the enjoyments and pains … corrupted and the impression of the experience just made glossed over by the new deceitful hope. This is the case with all the properly impelling passions, hunger, love, honour, avarice, &c” (PU, XIII: 10). The moral of the story, according to Hartmann, is that we should not necessarily trust people’s own estimations about the value of life, since people are structurally prone to cognitive biases, especially biases towards a positive valuation, on this very issue.

Hartmann’s point here can be read as an early approximation of the ‘Pollyanna Principle’, identified by psychologists Margaret Matlin and David Stang in the 1970s. This principle holds that average people tend to heavily focus upon, predict, and recall the positive aspects of living rather than the negative, and that “cognitive processes selectively favor processing of pleasant over unpleasant information”.Footnote ²⁵ The ways that this kind of bias can manifest are numerous, including “overestimating the size of valued objects, avoiding looking at unpleasant pictures, communicating good news more frequently than bad, and so on”.Footnote ²⁶ From both a Schopenhauerian and an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense: if we came to realise that life was actually a terrible burden and that its multitude of pains are rarely if ever compensated for, we might overcome our natural fear of death and cease to carry on living and propagating the species. This point has been more recently explored by evolutionary psychologists interested in the cognitive mechanisms that might have evolved over time to prevent suicide. The psychologist Cas Soper,Footnote ²⁷ for example, has argued that humans are in a unique position among other species in one crucial respect. While all sentient creatures register pain, only humans are cognitively complex enough (1) to reflect upon death as such and (2) to intellectualise our pain by reflecting upon it, reasoning about whether and how it can be mitigated. As soon as one is able to do (1) – typically in middle to late childhood and early adolescence – the concept of suicide can be entertained, and thus one becomes vulnerable to it. A component of the intelligence required for (1) and (2) is an apprehension of oneself across temporal points. Schopenhauer forcefully made this same claim, writing that humans “surpass animals as much in power as in suffering. Animals live only in the present; humans, meanwhile, live simultaneously in the future and the past” (WWR1, §8: 59; cf. PP2, §153: 265). As well as pains of anxiety over the future and the past, he notes the danger of comprehending death as such, uniquely facilitated by intelligence: “Animals only learn what death is in death itself: but human beings are conscious of drawing nearer to death with each passing hour. This makes life sometimes a rather dubious [bedenklich] prospect even for those who have not recognized that incessant annihilation is characteristic of life itself” (WWR1, §8: 60).

For Soper, what best explains a natural aversion to suicide is an evolved adaption for an optimistic disposition, constituted by (1) systematic self-deception as a means of suppressing pains and (2) a drive towards perpetual activity as a means of distracting from pains. Both of these mechanisms allow pain to register consciously as exceptions to the broader human experience rather than the rule. But according to Soper, this means that evolutionary selection pressures have produced adaptations that configure our psyche with a semi-illusory yet enhanced reality to experience. If this semi-illusory reality breaks down under the weight of chronic emotional distress, the brain naturally takes drastic emergency measures of a physiological kind to protect against suicide, symptoms of which are conditions usually considered ‘disorders’, such as depression, addiction, and psychosis.

Contemporary psychological analyses such as these have clear parallels with the proto-evolutionary psychological views evident in both Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s account of willing. Such analyses offer the proponents of hedonic arguments the means to account for intuitive feelings of attachment to life as what might be described as a kind of ‘Existential Stockholm Syndrome’: an irrational attachment to an oppressor, which in this case would be life itself. But as Hartmann recognises, a delusion about the quality of one’s own life can be fairly factored into the subject’s sum total estimation of life. If I experience some pleasure at the (erroneous) thought that my life is on balance very positive, this pleasure must itself contribute to my well-being; and if I more easily recall, predict, or focus upon pleasures than pains, these are still feelings, and must therefore affect my hedonic levels of well-being. But if it turns out that there are good reasons to think that my calculation about the sum total of good may be systematically warped, then any positive expression of the value of life I may give should not necessarily be the final say in the matter. This is where philosophy ought to be able to step in, Hartmann claims, with an impartial and fair analysis of the nature of happiness and the prospects for its attainability.

Hedonic arguments became the de facto justification for philosophical pessimism at the end of the 1860s, and for this reason they became a focus of critique from Nietzsche in his mature works. To be able to fully appreciate this critique later on, hedonic arguments have thus demanded more in-depth treatment. But there was a third type of argument for pessimism also worth drawing attention to.

‘Idealistic’ Arguments

A third type of argument for pessimism holds that because our ultimate values are unachievable, or are always accompanied by incomparable loss, life takes on a tragic character, such that non-existence is preferable to existence. Ultimate values might be broadly characterised as those that are good for their own sake, are felt to generate normative demands immune to compromise, and orient the subject’s general life-trajectory in a way felt to be meaningful. Idealistic arguments for pessimism leave open which values can have this form, be they moral, epistemic, political, or aesthetic.

To take one example: many understand freedom to be an ultimate value, and thus a necessary and/or sufficient condition for a life worth living. From here, a pessimistic argument could be constructed by attempting to show that freedom cannot, or will likely rarely ever, be realised. Depending on the many different ways one might define ‘freedom’, this could be because it turns out the universe is deterministic in a way that necessarily precludes genuine autonomous choice; alternatively, it could be that the demands of human survival means we must live in large societies, which in turn demands that we have to sacrifice too much personal sovereignty to let life be worth living. A similar form of argument might plausibly be made for the intrinsic unreachability of other possible ultimate values: significant knowledge (i.e., metaphysical, scientific, moral), virtue, and so forth.

In a short but highly suggestive paper on pessimism from 1936, Cornelius Krusé points out how this kind of ‘idealistic’ pessimism can be a result of a value fallout caused by advances in the sciences and philosophy:

One concern that drives pessimistic arguments such as these is the idea that without ultimate values, our lives might be ignoble or undignified, condemned to an existence of merely snatching at short-lived pleasures and doing our best to avoid pains. A good life, on this view, is a dignified life, where dignity is rooted in striving for ultimate values. This axiological condition was accepted by many critics of utilitarianism in the nineteenth century, for example, who thought that its explicit hedonism precluded a dignified life and that it was thus a doctrine fit for swine, as Thomas Carlyle famously quipped. John Stuart Mill took this objection seriously, and wrestled with the tensions between dignity and pleasure, sensitive as he was to a potentially pessimistic reading of utilitarian theory.Footnote ²⁹ As we shall see, Nietzsche came to endorse a version of this axiological condition entertained by the likes of Carlyle (see Section 7.2). Furthermore, the idea that hedonism might be an unwelcome result from the impossibility of realising our ultimate values, and not an axiological starting point, will prove to be a crucial distinction in Nietzsche’s later comparison of Schopenhauer with other pessimists such as Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer (see Section 7.5).

But why think our ultimate values are intrinsically unrealisable? One pessimism of the type under consideration was advanced by Julius Bahnsen. Briefly, Bahnsen’s pessimism is rooted in a metaphysical claim that reality is contradictory through and through (WWW: 97–98).Footnote ³⁰ While this sounds very similar to the conclusion of Schopenhauer’s ‘metaphysical’ argument’, Bahnsen’s reasons for endorsing this claim are in many ways radically anti-Schopenhauerian.Footnote ³¹ Perhaps most clearly, Bahnsen accepted the Schopenhauerian claim that Will is the essence of reality, but he attempted to combine this with Hegelian dialectic. He accepted Hegel’s postulation of two opposing forces – a ‘thesis’ and ‘anti-thesis’ – that animate world history. But Bahnsen forbade the possibility of their synthesis, which is the hallmark of teleological progress in any Weltprozess. Bahnsen’s term for this process is Realdialektik and forms the basis of his diagnosis of reality as irrational and contradictory. Bahnsen typically proceeds inductively to reach this point, beginning with observations of contradiction in local domains and then moving to establish more general principles that account for wider patterns of observation in the world.

Important for the ‘idealistic’ argument-type presently being considered is that Bahnsen’s metaphysics of contradiction manifests itself in the human experience as a futile struggle towards our ultimate values and ideals, in which we will always fall short. In a world that is itself contradictory and irrational, humans and all other conscious creatures are mere debris witnessing perpetual catastrophe. In Das Tragische als Weltgesetz und der Humor als ästhetische Gestalt des Metaphysischen (TWH) from 1877, Bahnsen for these reasons finds that the structure of life mirrors the essence of tragedy. Tragic heroes must choose between values, and will fail in some important respect no matter what is chosen (TWH: 50–51, 87). Their lives are characterised by a conflict in duties, but without resolution. In this way tragedy best represents the contradictory nature of the world. It’s not that there are no values; on the contrary, there are, and they are extremely demanding. The problem, rather, is that obtaining one good always comes at the expense of other goods. As a result, our ethical outlooks will be typically be dominated by feelings of regret, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and indecisiveness.

One way of illustrating the pessimistic character of this view is in contradistinction with two well-known features of Kant’s moral philosophy. The first is that (1) there are no genuine conflicts in moral duty. The second is that (2) the highest good is happiness in proportion to virtue. Bahnsen denies (1), showing a commitment to a form of irreducible pluralism about values and corresponding duties to realise them that do not vary across historical periods (WWW: 223–224). This pluralism inevitably leads to clashes, not only because it is simply false that what we ought to do is always clear, but because the realisation of one duty typically forfeits others. Bahnsen denies that (2) is possible to achieve. Kant’s view that the highest good is happiness in proportion to virtue is one enabled by his theistic commitments, and resembles the traditional story of how suffering in this worldly life will, on the condition of virtue, be compensated for and redeemed in a blissful afterlife. For Bahnsen, there is no heaven or God to guarantee harmony between virtue and happiness, but it is also an unrealistic hope in this life: because virtue is ultimately grounded in compassion for those who suffer (WWW: 170, 182, 211–212), and suffering is ubiquitous, our pursuit of virtue will inevitably conflict with our own happiness.Footnote ³² What Bahnsen’s ‘idealistic’ argument for the lamentable nature of life demonstrates is that, contrary to accusations by their opponents, pessimists are in fact highly moralistic in their outlook. For them, the world ought to be a certain way but, as a matter of fact, systematically falls short of that standard. In other words, the problem with life is not our values or a lack of them; it’s with the world.

This section has outlined three distinctive forms of argument for pessimism present in the nineteenth century: (1) metaphysical, (2) hedonic, and (3) idealistic arguments for pessimism. Hedonic arguments for pessimism remained the most often discussed in the Pessimismusstreit, but the appropriate priority among (1)–(3) will, as we shall see in Section 7.5, become of key importance to Nietzsche’s assessment of the post-Schopenhauerians relative to the pessimism of his ‘great teacher’. Before addressing Nietzsche’s entry into the dispute, it is crucial to first address a second task that the pessimists, and Schopenhauer especially, were eager to undertake: to demonstrate the widespread endorsement of pessimism throughout the most profound traditions of human history.