The word pessimism is used for two different things, and confusing them has done the philosophy no favors. In ordinary speech a pessimist is someone who expects things to go badly: the colleague who is sure the project will fail. In philosophy, pessimism is not a forecast. It is a judgment about the value of existence as such, and it would stand even if every project succeeded.
The philosophical pessimist holds that life contains more suffering than satisfaction, or that it has no purpose capable of redeeming its pains, or both. This is an argued position with a long history, and its defenders have included some of the most lucid and funniest writers in the canon. What follows is a guide to the arguments, the common misunderstandings, and the proper uses of the thing.
A thesis, not a temperament
The first point is that pessimism is compatible with a cheerful disposition. Plenty of its exponents were sociable, well fed and fond of music. They did not claim to be miserable. They claimed that a clear accounting of the human situation comes out in the red, and that most cheerfulness depends on not doing the accounts.
The opposite position, optimism, is also a thesis: that this is on balance a good world, or the best available, or at least heading somewhere good. The pessimist's quarrel is with that claim, and especially with its modern form, the belief in progress. Ottoline Brack's pamphlet Against the Bright Future, held in our library, is a late and angry specimen of the quarrel.
The three arguments
Stripped of ornament, the case rests on three arguments.
The argument from desire. To want something is to lack it, and lacking is a form of pain. When the want is met, the pleasure is brief and gives way to boredom or to a new want. Life therefore swings between two kinds of discomfort, striving and satiety, and what we call happiness is only the short interval in which one pain has stopped and the next has not begun. Satisfaction is real but structurally momentary. Dissatisfaction is the resting state.
The argument from asymmetry. Pain and pleasure are not equal and opposite. An hour of severe pain is not canceled by an hour of pleasure of equal intensity, if there is such a thing. The worst that can happen to a creature is far worse than the best is good. A world arranged this way cannot come out even, however the pleasures are multiplied.
The argument from indifference. Nothing in the universe is arranged for our benefit, or against it. The processes that produced us did so without intention and will continue without regret. Human purposes are real, but they are local and temporary, and no larger purpose stands behind them to guarantee that suffering is for something.
From these some pessimists draw a further and more startling conclusion: that coming into existence is always a harm, and that it would have been better never to have been. This position concerns the ethics of creating new lives, not the treatment of existing ones, and its serious defenders are emphatic about the difference. A life already under way has interests, attachments and projects that give its continuation value to the person living it. The argument is about beginning, not about going on.
What pessimism is not
Three neighbors are regularly mistaken for it.
It is not nihilism. The nihilist holds that nothing matters. The pessimist holds that suffering matters a great deal; that is the whole basis of the complaint. A view that takes pain this seriously is not a view on which values have collapsed. The several things that have gone by the name of nihilism are distinguished in Nihilism: Four Ways of Wanting Nothing.
It is not cynicism. The cynic, in the modern sense, believes that people are selfish and that decency is a pose. Most pessimists believe something nearly opposite: that people are fellow sufferers who are owed patience precisely because their situation is so poor.
It is not depression. This is the distinction that matters most. Depression is an illness. It distorts judgment, it is treatable, and it has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of any philosophical thesis. Pessimism is a conclusion about the world. Depression is a condition of a person. If the dark thought is that existence in general is a doubtful bargain, that is philosophy, and you are in good company. If the dark thought is about you in particular, that you are a burden or that things would be better without you, that is not philosophy and should not be argued with alone. It is a reason to talk to someone you trust, or to a doctor, today.
Pessimism is a conclusion about the world. Depression is a condition of a person. Only one of them is an argument.
The consolations
It is one of the stranger facts about this literature that people report feeling better for reading it. There are reasons.
The first is relief from expectation. A great deal of unhappiness comes from the belief that one ought to be happy, and that falling short is a personal failure. To be told on good authority that the game is hard for everyone, by design, lifts a specific weight.
The second is compassion. If everyone is in the same leaking boat, then the irritating stranger is also a fellow passenger. Pessimist ethics tend to be gentle: reduce suffering where you can, do not add to it, and forgive easily, since no one asked to be here.
The third is art. Several pessimists held that in contemplating a work of art, and music above all, the grinding wheel of wanting stops for a while. One does not want anything from a piece of music. For its duration one is let off.
The fourth is laughter. Pessimism is the natural home of the dry remark, because it has nothing to lose by honesty. The tradition of the deadpan almanac and the mock prophecy, of which our library's Tin Sun Almanac is a late example, is pessimism in its most sociable form.
How to use it
Pessimism is best treated as a corrective rather than a home. Taken in measured doses it does several useful things.
It inoculates against disappointment, and against those who sell disappointment's opposite. It is very hard to recruit a pessimist to a scheme that promises paradise, whether the scheme is political, commercial or spiritual. In an age of slow decline, that resistance has practical value.
It redirects effort from the pursuit of happiness to the reduction of harm, which is a more achievable target and has the advantage that one can tell whether one is hitting it.
And it permits a certain steadiness. The optimist is forever being surprised by events. The pessimist, having expected little, is free to notice that a given afternoon is, against the odds, perfectly all right. That is not a refutation of the philosophy. It is the reward for holding it properly.