A defense of optimism

Not Leibnitz's extravagance but the far more limited claim that "the good in this state of existence preponderates over the bad."

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1839, chapter 6.

Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, was published in 1819.

Schopenhauer made an extravagant case that human life, at least, was for each and every one of us a losing game, on hedonist terms.

Historically, most hedonists, though not all - Google Hegesias, "the death persuader" - , have agreed with Epicurus and Henry Sidgwick against Schopenhauer that life is generally and for most of us, for a good while, at least, choiceworthy.

It has been speculated Hegesias was influenced by Buddhism.

About Schopenhauer there is no need for speculation.

(And a very amusing attack on aristocracy in the same chapter.)

Schopenhauer's greatest disciple

Nietzsche is Schopenhauer's greatest student.

He is a profound pessimist whose originality is to rather madly say "Yes" to the very same world from which pessimism has always urged flight.

Reading his biography by Daniel Halevy.

Nietzsche says he is a pessimist in the preface to Human, All Too Human, Part II, aphorism 2.

He says in aphorism 1 that Schopenhauer is his greatest teacher.

He is a pessimist who rejects romanticism, he says.

A pessimist who affirms rather than rejects life.

Caught!

"Come, we burn daylight, ho!"

Mercutio, Act I, scene 4, line 45, Romeo and Juliet.

In case you thought that was an expression invented by cowboys.

The same scene,  lines 115 thru 122.

Is Shakespeare a fatalist?

Is Romeo?

Is it God who has the steerage of Romeo's course?

Teenage boys, armed, are bloody-minded fools.

Consider, for just one example, Tybalt in Act I, scene 5, who so furiously longs to kill Romeo.

As for the blast of love at first sight in the same scene, see Stendhal.

Or maybe Schopenhauer.

Zeffirelli made it work in 1968.

Can anything teach so well as this the absurd vacuity of exclusive pursuit of self-interest?

As to the scoffers, Act II, scene 1, line 1.

"He jests at scars, that never felt a wound."

Romeo, a propos of nothing,  at Juliet's balcony.

All his life

HATH, Part 1, aphorism 71, Hope.

He never entirely lost his deep affinity for Schopenhauer.

Is this about sex?

Is he thinking about Schopenhauer?

Heck, he could as well be thinking about Cohle and season 1 of True Detective.

Poor Friedrich.

HATH, Vol 1, aphorism 17, Metaphysical explanation.

Lost opportunities

What if Schopenhauer had also written novels?

Or poetry?

Thomas Hardy is close, but still.

Reading Karamazov.

Nature, happiness, and self-intetest

Sexual reproduction and all that it entails, physically, mentally, emotionally, passionately, or behaviorally, are Nature's abject sacrifice of the individual to the species.

So held Schopenhauer.

Mutatis mutandis, putting the gene for the species, so hold contemporary sociobiologists.

We are social neither for society's sake nor for our own, but to better achieve the purposes of Nature.

And by Nature, to its same aims, are our intelligence, our character, and our very conative and affective natures, shaped.

And so the interests and happiness of the individual are betrayed by his desires, his lusts, his deepest emotional needs, and even his body, from his reproductive organs to the genetic material of each and every cell.

Philosophers who seek to define the interests or the happiness of the individual in terms of his desires or preferences could not be more wrong.

But to admit this is to admit that the interests or the happiness of the individual do not require very much at all.

So little that it seems to most people almost disparaging of him, his choices, and his life to say of someone that throughout his life those were as well served as human nature and fortunate circumstance could make possible.

Certainly it seems a moral and religious condemnation.

A life dominated by sex

From about 12 years old to 70, human lives are overwhelmed and absolutely possessed by the sex drive.

And then it slacks off and we almost recover the freedom of children.

But then so few are the years remaining!

Dodged a bullet

More than once in my youth I was saved from parenthood by very sensible and unwilling women who knew me better than I, in a fit of transient passion, knew myself.

Nature clumsily tailors our desires to her purposes, lust, it seems, more clumsily than most.

Her purpose is far from the wellbeing or even the survival of the individual.

We are driven mad with lust that we might reproduce, at whatever cost to ourselves.

Even those who, as we might say, have no vocation for parenthood.

Nature is prodigal and wasteful of us and our lives.

Thomas Hardy.

Schopenhauer.

The end of funny?

Actually rather amusing up to now, rather like Dickens, the funny stops with a few remarks that, in French, might have been Zola.

 

The House of the Seven Gables,  Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851, B&N Classics, 2007.

 

Page 106.

 

Phoebe has just met Judge Pyncheon.

 

She notes his "hard, cold, relentless" look, by which he resembles his long dead ancestor of the same name, the man who built the house on stolen land, and wonders if it is his settled character, inherited.

 

Hawthorne intrudes, commenting this realization implies a hereditary transmission of "criminal tendencies" and "moral defects" more certain than the hereditary transmission of wealth and property according to law.

 

Not funny.

 

Character is destiny, said Heraclitus and Schopenhauer.

 

A remark of which Sheriff Longmire's libertarian interpretation the other night could not have been more absurd. 

La Cigale et la Fourmi

Might as well burn your nest-egg as waste it trying to help the improvident.

They will just piss it all away, and then they will be as bad off as before.

But this time you will be right there with them.

Smart move, eh?

A life lesson from La Fontaine.

Character, they say, is destiny.

Or was it Schopenhauer?

La cigale , ayant chanté

Tout l'été,

Se trouva fort dépourvue

Quand la bise fut venue.

Pas un seul petit morceau

De mouche ou de vermisseau

Elle alla crier famine

Chez la fourmi sa voisine,

La priant de lui prêter

Quelque grain pour subsister

Jusqu'à la saison nouvelle

«Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,

Avant l'oût , foi d'animal,

Intérêt et principal .»

La fourmi n'est pas prêteuse ;

C'est là son moindre défaut.

«Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?

Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.

Nuit et jour à tout venant

Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.

- Vous chantiez ? j'en suis fort aise.

Eh bien : dansez maintenant.»

Anslo Garrick

In episode 9 of Blacklist, Red tells us why he doesn't want to die.

Not a word about fear of death, nothingness, or Hell.

It's all about things he wants to do that, of course, he can't do if he's dead.

That he would not regret missing out on those things if he were dead, while true, is not a reason not to want those things, and wanting them remains reason to stay alive.

In case, having taken Camus too seriously, you were wondering.

Or in case, having read Schopenhauer, you were thinking people live out of fear of death, and find ways to keep busy so as not to be bored by the emptiness and fatuity of existence.

To live and be free of all physical pain and discomfort

That is Epicurus's definition of happiness.

Well, almost.

But through what had happened in the past Jove had become aware of the true nature of men: that it is not enough for them, as it is for other animals, to live and be free of all physical pain and discomfort; rather, always and in every condition, they crave the impossible, and the less they are afflicted by other evils, the more they torment themselves with their desire.

Leopardi, History of the Human Race. Giovanni Cecchetti, trans.

This is a straight ahead collision between Epicureanism, ancient or modern, and not just Leopardi but any form of pessimism.

The characteristic view of pessimism is that happiness is impossible, even in the short term; suffering and wretchedness are the universal human lot; life is clearly and decisively not worth living for anyone, ever.

In a nutshell, life's a bitch and then you die - except that Schopenhauer and no doubt others follow Indian religion in supposing reincarnation in a whole succession of lives, all equally hideous.

But the pessimists, to my mind, are just so many drama queens, the whole lot of them.

Existentialists and absurdists included, come to that.

Their views differ among themselves and from the pessimists only as twists of the knife.

Dienstag quotes Unamuno from The Tragic Sense of Life, which I read some forty years ago and do not remember, writing "Consciousness is a disease."

Figuratively, of course, though not literally, for animals in general and particularly for humans, consciousness is life itself, is existence.

Death must then be the cure, or the most complete coma.

And yet, though several pessimists have drawn the lesson and actually counseled suicide, none have followed their own advice, that I know of.

Others have let themselves, at least, off with flabby excuses, pleas of cowardice in the face of death, or appeals to instinct.

Think of Schopenhauer or TV characters like Dr. House, Det. Cohle, and perhaps Sherlock Holmes.

Pshaw.

The idea that pessimism and its contrary, optimism, exhaust the alternatives is silly.

To live and be free of significant anguish, physical pain, and discomfort, most of the time, with the usual amusements and occasions of special joy along with satisfactory personal relationships, is an achievable and sufficient happiness for most humans, most of the time.

I do not say all humans.

I do not say all of the time.

I do say that is enough.

More than enough, in fact, to make life eligible, at least, as everyone's life from time to time, for longer or briefer periods, falls short in one way or another.

For that matter, the happiness of many lives is permanently marred or limited in one way or another, while yet those lives continue eligible, it seems, to those who live them.

Certainly, it's a subjective question.

But equally certainly they do not always seem wrong.

Pleasure

Schopenhauer was right to insist that pain is real, but he was wrong that pleasure is not.

On the other hand, Epicurus was right that getting pleasure as commonly undertaken generally entails a lot of trouble, not unusually more than it is worth.

Epicurus was thinking of sex when he said that, but one might also consider the use of adult beverages.

Clearly, much in either case depends on moderation and prudence.

Probably, Schopenhauer too was thinking of sex when he said that pleasure is only relief.

The German also held that, pleasure being unreal and pain only too much so, the avoidance or minimization of pain is the only reasonable rule of life.

A rule he never followed, demanding as it does, since he agreed a longer is a more painful life, a quick and painless suicide.

Sometimes, however, he claims only that pleasure occurs only with or as the relief of an always greater pain.

This is still wrong - there are, for instance, pleasant surprises that are not episodes of unexpected relief of pain - but it is not silly.

And sometimes the pleasure that comes with relief is considerably greater than the distress relieved.

Of course I, too, am thinking of sex.

Not very popular since the mid-20th Century, before that it was generally admitted that pain is an evil and at least innocent pleasure a good, and the hedonist view that only pleasure is good in itself and only pain thus evil was a serious competitor, along with the view that happiness is the excess of pleasure over pain.

Like egoism, hedonism has historically been offered, generally by the same people, in an ethical and a psychological version.

And again like egoism, a purely empirical hedonism, neither ethical nor quite the other, is available concerning the way things generally seem to go.

We note that humans commonly seem to give little or no weight to the interests or concerns of others as against their own, except in varying degrees for some few persons most close to them.

Likewise, they seem in practice to attribute little significance to anything but their own pleasure - or at any rate what pleases them - , their own pain, and their own happiness, taking account of those of some few others as they would those of their pets. 

Perhaps very beloved - even excessively beloved - pets, but still pets.

Perhaps not surprisingly, egoism and hedonism are often advanced by the same people.

Henry Sidgwick, contemporary of Nietzsche, professed both hedonism - more Bentham's than Mill's - and egoism.

(And also act utilitarianism, but never mind that.)

Against the pessimists he insisted that, the ordinary background tenor of life being somewhat pleasant, most of the time for most of us life is happier than not.

And the prospects for many of us, at least, and much of the time, do not make immediate suicide the prudent choice.

There is some question whether he took sufficiently into account such common phenomena as chronic though mild arthritis and the myriad episodic and impermanent pains of life.

The pessimist tradition

The excellent aphorisms of Cioran remind me sometimes of La Rochefoucauld, or Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Leopardi.

Gratian not so much.

Napoleon not at all.