Introduction to Philosophical Pessimism | Episode 1

[gentle music] Pessimism has an image problem.

To be a pessimist is synonymous with being a moody old man that always sees the worst in things, and someone who always thinks the worst is going to happen.

And don't get me wrong, there are those kinds of pessimists.

But philosophical pessimism as a set of ideas is different, and it's nothing new.

Pessimism has a rich history across different geographies and cultures and religions.

Thousands of years ago, people were already questioning the value of existence.

In the Book of Ecclesiastes of the Hebrew Bible, we find pronouncements that everything is meaningless, and that better than both the living and the dead is the one who has never been born.

In Buddhist texts, the first of the four noble truths is that life is suffering and dissatisfaction, or dukkha.

And if you go back to ancient Greek literature, we find the wisdom of Solinus, that best of all is not to be born, but second best is to die as quickly as possible.

So the idea that our human condition is one that is fundamentally negative is nothing new.

It's been around for a while.

But if we are to jump forward to the point at which pessimism as a philosophy really started to incubate, then we have to come to more recent times.

In the 17th century through to the 19th century, there was a great debate raging amongst philosophers on the problem of evil, the question of how an all good and all-knowing and all-powerful God could permit the existence of such evil and suffering in the world.

And it was in the competing answers to these questions that the philosophies of optimism and pessimism were really forged.

The optimists argued that the evil and suffering in the world, as horrible as it was, was reconcilable with the existence of such a God, and that the world that we lived in was just the best of all possible worlds.

And the pessimists were just unconvinced by this.

They didn't think that the suffering and the evil that we see in the world was reconcilable with such a God.

The term pessimism itself, though, was coined in the 18th century by Jesuit critics of the French writer and philosopher Voltaire responding to his novel Candide.

Candide was a satirization of the worldview of one of the primary optimists of the time, Gottfried Leibniz.

The novel follows Candide, a privileged young man who was raised and immersed in the optimism of Leibniz by his tutor, Pangloss.

One day, Candide is banished from the castle he was raised in and is cast out into the world, where he witnesses and experiences many of the calamities of life, from earthquakes and disease to war and murder.

And we follow how his experience of these calamities clashes with the optimism that he was raised with.

So in responding to Voltaire, his critics accused him of pessimism, which was the first use of the term, essentially accusing him of doing the same thing that Leibniz has done, who he's criticizing, but just in the negative direction rather than the positive one, making out that we live in the worst of all possible worlds, and that was how the term pessimism came to be coined.

So this debate around the problem of suffering and the earlier contributors to pessimism like Voltaire, but also the French philosopher Pierre Bayle and the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, played a vital role in laying the foundation for what would go on to become a more developed and more systematic philosophy of pessimism that would arise out of Germany in the 19th century.

And this is where perhaps the most famous of all pessimists comes in, Arthur Schopenhauer.