Pessimism is the doctrine that on the whole the world is bad rather than good. It does not necessarily mean that the world is the worst possible of all conceivable worlds, as the fact of its being the verbal opposite to Optimism, the term employed to describe the Leibnizian philosophy, would seem to imply; it means simply that the world is so bad that it would be better if it did not exist. Pessimism presents itself in a twofold aspect—(1) as a settled attitude of mind or permanent mood of feeling, and (2) as a philosophical system. The former springs out of the contemplation of the antagonism that exists in the world between natural laws and moral laws, between the world as it actually is and the world as it ought to be; it is the outcome of reflection, and is largely conditioned by individual temperament. Thus it is coeval with the dawn of conscious intelligence, and early found fit literary expression. The problem of the existence of evil, the connection between suffering and sin, is the burden of the ancient Hebrew Book of Job; and the Jewish thinker who wrote Ecclesiastes rings the changes upon the nothingness of life, and sums up his plaint in the hopeless refrain, 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity.' Different forms of the same temper of mind are given utterance to with more or less of moral indignation in Innocent III.'s De Miseria Humanae Conditionis, and the satirical works of Juvenal and Carlyle and others. The same 'world-sadness' (Weltschmerz), though expressed in more personal and passionate language, colours deeply the poetry of Omar Khayyam, Leopardi, Heine, and Byron; and the negation of the problem, 'Is life worth living?' forms an undercurrent in much of our best modern literature. But the pessimistic temper, culminating in the persuasion of the nothingness and vanity of human life, has had more than an individual expression; it has entered deeply into the substance and structure of two of the world's greatest religious beliefs—viz. Christianity and Buddhism. The Christian is familiar with the doctrine that this earthly life is a vale of tears and woe, and that its pleasures and joys are illusory, being always accompanied with sin and suffering and evil, from which he can only escape by fixing his hopes upon a better life in the world to come. Buddha's practical teaching (see BUDDHISM) turns in great part upon the desire to escape from the sorrows of life and the deceptive illusions of existence (maya).
But here, in this latter point, the pessimistic mood assumes something of a philosophical character. It also enters, though principally as an unconscious element, into the philosophical doctrines of the Stoics and the Neoplatonists, in that they regarded man's sensual (sense) nature as opposed and inferior to his intellectual. The mediæval mystics (Eckhart) combined the religious with the philosophical tendencies of the mood that 'despiseth the earth,' but not in a conscious, deliberately philosophical fashion. But it is only in the most recent times that pessimism has been elaborated into a philosophy or complete theory, in the systems of Schopenhauer (q.v.) and his successor, E. von Hartmann (q.v.). Schopenhauer is generally considered to be the father of philosophical pessimism: he regards the world principle as an omnipotent, blindly struggling and striving Will, which is incapable of satisfying itself or of delivering itself from its eternal cyclic misery. Hartmann formulates as world principle the Unconscious, whose primal error, for which it eternally atones in the endless misery of the world, was its kindling—just as Schopenhauer's Will did—a light for itself in the brain, or the consciousness of organised life. Both philosophers build on the pain and misery and struggle which they see everywhere in the world, from chemical decomposition and stellar movement up through the endless struggle of organisms for existence to the acute suffering exhibited in the many forms of human passion, and chiefly of all in exalted passionate love or sexual desire (Romeo and Juliet, or Kabale und Liebe of Schiller); and to both all this is only the outward expression of the terrible, irrational, or non-logical cosmic agency. It is extremely difficult to state shortly the metaphysical grounds of pessimism; they are far from being merely superficial, and may be said to be rooted in the old antitheses between nature and man. Nature thwarts man at all points, and modern science has shown us what a small twig human life is on the great tree. Both Schopenhauer and Hartmann lay a firm hold on the fact (emphasised especially by Schopenhauer in opposition to Hegel and to theism) that not only the Idea or Logos must be used in replanning the world, but also Force, Impulse, Will, Strife. Thus in a sense they represent the substitution of the scientific or cosmic attitude towards the world for the merely introspective attitude of a Descartes or a 'common-sense' moralist. It is not, of course, in the least to be assumed that what we call 'naturalism,' as opposed to speculation or supernaturalism, leads to pessimism, mental and spiritual facts being just as ultimate as chemical protoplasm. The full force of pessimism lies in the assertion that all the ends and aims of life are illusory, that life, in fact, brings only illusion; the illusion of illusions being man's innate and inveterate belief that he is born to be happy and to have pleasure. There are here two main contentions: (1) All ends are illusory, even cosmic ends, for nothing is ever attained in the world, seeing that the essence of the world—that which holds it together—is strife and change. Pessimism, that is, really denies teleology, as Darwinism does, in the old sense of the term. (2) In the case of the individual life there is excess of unhappiness and pain over happiness and pleasure. But there is no reason for despising the realisation of certain ends because there always arises a limitless number of new ends to be realised; of course we do not wish to limit the world process. Pessimism thus really comes to stake its case on the individual, which (let us say) to a certain extent we do immediately know. The natural man wants to fill infinity, to gratify all his desires, to embrace in himself all the ends of the world, and because he cannot do this, but even fails to get immediate ends gratified, he votes the world execrable. The pessimists in the end do not escape the all-embracing human standpoint of anthropomorphism, anxious though Schopenhauer is to avoid the errors of metaphysicians and 'transcendental idealism.' They examine man, and what they find to be true of man they predicate of the world: he 'measures' all things—is the microcosm. Still, we must concede that, if to man the world brings only illusion, it is a failure—for him. The central position, then, of pessimism inevitably comes to be that living beings have as matter of fact an excess of pain over pleasure.
To this position the psychologist answers: (1) That pleasure and pain are not things that can be balanced one against the other. Both are degrees of feeling, which, though itself a constant element of experience, is only one element; and what we do as matter of fact measure and are conscious of is the amount of change or transition in our feeling, there being of course no absolute measure of amount of pleasurable or painful feeling. (2) Even if by the help of memory and calculation, and observation and reflection (for there is really enormous difficulty in the matter), we allow ourselves to think of sums of pleasures and sums of pains (there are writers who say the phrases are the purest nonsense), yet no one standard of pleasurable or painfulness, no 'hedonistic calculus' or universal method of measuring pain against pleasure, can be fixed upon. (3) Even supposing we had an estimate of pleasures and pains, it is not psychologically legitimate to regard feeling of any kind as the end of action; it is only its relative and individual index or measure (i.e. whether normal or abnormal), while there are absolute measures of action in the ends or things accomplished. (4) There are actions which have a final value apart from their pleasurable character, although also as matter of fact the attainment of ends brings (as accompaniment and not as end) a feeling of immediate pleasure—e.g. the adaptation of the eye to a pleasing object or healthy muscular exercise in general. Schopenhauer went so far as to say that pleasure is only the absence of pain, pain alone being the positive and preponderating element in a sensitive consciousness. This is simply not true: pleasure—if we take the liberty of talking of pleasure as a thing—is as positive as pain is, and the strife which exists in all life is not necessarily painful.
If we ask the pessimist if there is any freedom or release from the 'bondage of man,' we are answered: (1) The light which the Unconscious Will has kindled for itself in the brain of man (pessimism has of course a pronouncedly naturalistic side) confers on us at least one advantage; employing this light, we may for brief moments pause, and survey with pity the awful slavery and strife of life. In a word, artistic perception, the insight into things of the man of genius, of the emancipated intellect, is freedom: art, asceticism, quietistic sympathy, is each the oasis and salvation in the howling wilderness of life. (2) While individual suicide is to be deprecated as the acme of the selfish assertion of the Will to be happy, it is to be hoped that some day the human race will be educated enough to see the contemptible character of life, and, by a united act of enlightened will, will shake off life and throw the world back into its primeval state of innocence, ignorance, and mere potentiality, and thus become the 'saviour' of the world. There is a basis of moral perception in all this, but it is fantastical: it is the exaggerated statement of the intellectual conditions of salvation often stated in philosophy, as in Aristotle's 'life of contemplation,' the gods of Epicurus, and Spinoza's view of things 'in the light of eternity.' If we demur that it is, then, only the few who can be saved, we are told that the lot of life is one; my life is the same as that in the plant or the planet, and there is, as matters at present stand, not the least fear that the 'will to live' will die out with the death of my life in quietism, agnosticism, and mysticism.
To the metaphysic of pessimism we may also say: (1) That it is not necessary to have a theory of the world in order to make action possible: no one lives because he chooses to live, but because he must, and this apart from the question whether a theory of life is attainable or already attained. (2) That the value of life cannot be measured altogether by the expectations or equations of the individual as to his own happiness, and that therefore pessimism is overthrown with the rejection of empirical Hedonism or the theory of ethical conduct that makes happiness the end of life. (3) Pessimism has done good in showing up the illusions to which an acceptance of the Hedonistic or the Epicurean ethic leads in theory and practice; it might be held in fact to give a negative account of man's perfection as consisting not in happiness for happiness' sake, but in the pursuit of ends which are absolutely real, apart from man's desire or aversion to them: to the self-seeking self everything is foreign and negative, and also to the perfection-seeking self the ends of appetite and desire are illusory. The various forms of pessimism—the practical, the biological, the sociological, the poetical, are all of value as provisional accounts of the ethical end. The unconditional sympathy with all forms of life inculcated in modern pessimism is a valuable contribution to ethical theory and history, although of course it is not exactly original to pessimism. (4) The world which Schopenhauer and Hartmann theoretically conceive of is a world which baffles the individual, because in the first instance it appears to them that the world is incomprehensible. Both, in fact, tend to erect our ignorance of the world into a positive principle—the Unconscious; but this is an old metaphysical fallacy. The world which the individual does know—i.e. the small sphere of it he knows—is not a sphere in which he cannot realise himself, but in Kantian language a moral kingdom; it will baffle him if he is only bent on his own happiness. Thus it has been indicated how in a sense the pessimists are not to be held down to an Epicurean theory of morals, although they take their start from that.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Schopenhauer's chief work is the World as Will and Idea (Eng. trans. 3 vols. 1883-86). His ethic is contained chiefly in the fourth book, on the Assertion and Denial of the Will to Live. The appendices contain many exceedingly readable and lucid presentations of the main points of his system, and so do many of the sections of the Parerga and Paralipomena, which have a high literary value. See translations of these in Mr T. B. Saunders's 'Schopenhauer' series (1890 et seq.). Hartmann's views are expounded in Philosophy of the Unconscious, which is also translated into English (1884). An admirable short account of his system for the laic mind is that of Dr A. Drews (Ed. v. Hartmann's Philosophie, 1890). E. Wallace's account of pessimism in the Westminster Review (1876) is eminently instructive, and has chief reference to Hartmann. An introductory treatise is also that of A. Taubert, Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner (1873). Mr Sully's Pessimism (1877) is an admirable and careful psychological criticism of pessimism, and contains a good historical sketch. In it there is a list of pessimistic literature. As an introduction to pessimism some account of Leibnitz's philosophy ought to be read, and after it Voltaire's vigorous and drastic criticism of the same in Candide; the latter will help one to understand what Schopenhauer meant when he called optimism a 'wicked and otiose shallow philosophy.' The religious aspect of pessimism is touched on in an essay in Seth and Haldane's Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883), and also in Professor Tulloch's Modern Theories (1884).