PESSIMISM
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PESSIMISM
many attempts to account for the presence of evil in
the world (see Evil). Leibniz held that "metaphys-
ical" evil is necessarily involved in the creation of
finite existences, and that the possibility of sin and
consequent suffering is inalienable from the existence
of free and rational creatures. The principle from
which evil arises is thus made to be an integral part
of the actual constitution of nature, though its de-
velopment is regarded as contingent. With Scho-
penhauer, the originator of Pessimism as a system,
as with those who have accepted his qualitative esti-
mate of the value of existence, evil in the full sense
is not merely, as with Leibniz, a possible develop-
ment of certain fundamental principles of nature, but
is itself the fundamental jirincijile of the life of man.
The world is essentially bad and "ought not to be".
Schopenhauer holds that all existence is constituted by the objectivization of will, which is the sole and universal reality. Will is blind and unconscious until it is objectivized in human beings, in whom it first attains to consciousness, or the power of representa- tion (Idea: Vorslelhmg). Hence arises the constant suffering which is the normal condition of human life. The essential nature of will is to desire and strive; and the consciousness of this perpetual unfulfilled de- sire is pain. Pleasure is merely an exception in hu- man experience, the rare and brief cessation of the striving of the will, the temporary absence of pain. This theory recalls that of Plato ("Phajdo") who re- garded pleasure as the mere absence of pain; and the conception of conscious life as essentially painful and undesirable is nearly identical with the Buddhist notion (quoted with approval by Schopenhauer) that conscious existence is fundamentally and necessarily evil. Hence, further, comes the ethical theory of Schopenhauer, which may be summed up as the ne- cessity for "denying the Will to live". Peace can be attained only in proportion as man ceases to desire; thus the pain of Ufe can be minimized only by an ascetic renunciation of the search after happiness, and can be abolished only by ceasing to live. On the same principle, the poet Leopardi extolled suicide; and Mainlander took his own life.
Schopenhauer's philosophical system of Monism has generally been regarded as in a great degree ])urely fanciful and self -contradictory. The teleological function attributed to the unconscious will, which produces phenomenal existence through the inter- vention of quasi-Platonic ideas, is obviously out of place; and the notion that we can through conscious- ness perceive will as apart from consciousness in our automatic bodily functions and thence also in the external world, creates a confusion between the ra- tional will which we know in ourselves as the cause of action, and mere tendency or instinct, for which the characteristics of will are arbitrarily assumed.
Von Hartmann endeavoured to improve upon Schopenhauer by taking the unconscious {Unbewusst) as the foundation of reality. Will and idea are with him twin functions of the unconscious, which en- ergizes both in them and apart from them. The idea becomes conscious through its opposition to will, and from this opposition arises the incurable, because es- sential, evil of life. In order to induce men to con- tinue to exist, the unconscious leads them on to the jiursuit of an unattainable happiness. The delusion presents itself in three successive forms, or stages, corresponding to the childhood, youth, and manhood of the race. In the first stage happiness is considered as attainable in the present life; in the second it is relegated to a transcendental future beyond the grave, and in the third (the present day) it is looked forward to as the future result of human progress. All are equally delusive ; and there occurs, as a necessary con- sequence, at the end of each stage, and before the discovery of the next, the "voluntary surrender of individual existence" by suicide; and when, in its old
age, the race has discovered the futility of its hopes
it will desire nothing but unconsciousness and so will
cease to will, and therefore to be.
Meanwhile, the moral duty of man is to co-operate in the cosmic process which leads to this end. He is "to make the ends of the Unconscious his own ends", to renounce the hope of individual happiness, and so by the suppression of egoism to be reconciled with life as it is. Here von Hartmann claims to have harmonized Optimism and Pessimism, by finding in his own Pessimism the strongest conceivable im- pulse to effective action. With von Hartmann, Ufe is not, as with Schopenhauer, essentially painful; but pain predominates greatly over pleasure: and the world is the outcome of a systematic evolution, by which the end of the unconscious will eventually be attained in the return of humanity into the peace of unconsciousness. The world is not, as Schopenhauer considered it, the worst possible, but the best, as is shown by the adaptation of means to ends in the evolutionary process. Nevertheless it is altogether bad, and had better not have been.
The unconscious of von Hartmann is involved in the same self-contradiction as the will of Schopen- hauer. It is difficult to attach any real significance to the conception of consciousness as a function of the unconscious, or to that of purposive action by the unconscious. Considered simply as a reasoned basis for a doctrine of Pessimism, von Hartmann's system appears much like a Gnostic mythology, or such quasi-mystical imagery as that of Jacob Boehme, representing the pessimistic aspect of the actual world. From this point of view it may be said that both Schopenhauer and Hartmann rendered some service by emphasizing the perpetual contrast between desire and achievement in human affairs, and by call- ing attention to the essential function of suffering in human life. Schopenhauer and von Hartmann stand alone as the originators of metaphysical systems of an essentially pessimistic character. The subject has also, however, been treated from a philosophical standpoint by Bahnsen, Mainlander, Duprel, and Preuss, and has been discussed from a more or less optimistic point of view by Diihring, Caro, Sully, W. James, and many others. The extravagant spec- ulations of Nietzsche are to a great extent founded on his early sympathy with the point of view of Schopenhauer.
The view to be taken of the contention of Pessi- mism depends mainly on whether the question can be settled by an estimate — supposing that one can be formed — of the relative amount of pleasure and pain in average human hfe. It may well be thought that such a calculus is impossible, since it must obviously depend in a gi-eat degree on purely subjective and therefore variable considerations. Pleasure and pain vary indefinitely both in kind and intensity with per- sons of differing idiosyncrasies. Life, it is contended, may still be happy, even though its pains may exceed its pleasures; or it may be worthless even if the re- verse is the case. The point of view involves a judg- ment of values, rather than a quantitative estimate of pleasure and pain. The true pessimistic estimate of life would be that it is rather unhappy, because it is worthless, than worthless because it is imhappy. But again, values can be estimated or judged only accord- ing to the degree of personal satisfaction they imply; and we are brought back to a merely svibjective view of the value of life, unless we can discover some ab- solute standard, some estimate of the comparative importance of its pleasures and pains which is invari- able and the same for all. Such a standard of value is to be found in reUgious belief, and exists in its most complete form in the faith of Cathohcs. Religion fixes the scale of values by reference not to varying individual sensibilities, but-to an eternal law which is always ideally and may be actually the reason of the
