(Page 2 of 30) - The Anatomy of Pessimism: Outline of a Neglected Tradition authored by Dienstag, Joshua.

Dienstag 1 8/26/04

The idea that a pessimistic philosophy is necessarily

one of discouragement is a puerile idea, but one

that needs too long a refutation.

-- Albert Camus

Can it really be the case that an entire tradition of thought has gone missing from

our standard histories of political theory? A claim like this has to sound extravagant on
first hearing. In some sense, perhaps, it is extravagant – but not in the way that
immediately comes to mind. In attempting to reframe the history of political thought so
that pessimism becomes one of its major strands, I will not be arguing for paying
attention to a series of writers who have been, heretofore, wholly unknown. While there
certainly are authors, important to identify, who have been unjustly neglected on account
of their pessimism, that is not the only, or even the main story. I shall be arguing,
instead, that while many of the pessimists are well-known, the nature of their common
project (indeed, the very idea that they have a common project) has been obscured. Since
pessimism is understood more as a disposition rather than as a theory, pessimists are seen
primarily as dissenters from whatever the prevailing consensus of their time happens to
be, rather than as constituting an continuous alternative. The result is that each seems
disconnected from the mainstream of the history of political thought. They appear as
voices in the wilderness, to put it politely – or, less politely, as cranks. While they are
often admired for their style, or respected for the critiques they offer, ultimately, their
lack of a ‘positive project’ can be made to appear as a badge of second-rank
philosophical status. They interest us; but, it is thought, they cannot possibly orient us.

With greater or lesser degrees of respect, then, pessimists have in many cases

been dismissed from the upper reaches of the canon of political thought. Or, when they
are admitted, as in the case of a figure like Nietzsche, they are taken to be radically
isolated from other elements in that canon. Nietzsche’s philosophy is highly distinctive,
of course. But this should not blind us to the ways in which he, like many of the other
figures to be discussed here, remains part of a tradition which has itself been rendered
invisible. Even as, in recent decades, the traditional list of great works has been
strenuously attacked, stretched, revised and reconsidered, the idea of a pessimistic
political theory has not been seriously entertained. There are several reasons for this –
but none of them are really barriers to a reconsideration of pessimism. First, as I
mentioned above, pessimism is often taken to be a state of mind, rather than a philosophy
or philosophical orientation. This is perfectly understandable; there are, of course, happy
and unhappy people and they do tend to have different attitudes about the world. But just
as theories of progress are not the same thing as a cheerful attitude towards life, neither
should pessimism be equated with a foul disposition. Nor is it even true that these
attitudes and philosophies are regularly correlated in individuals. John Stuart Mill, for
example, was famously optimistic in his belief about the long-term growth of mankind
through the continuous application of reason, and he was just as famously depressive and
dyspeptic. Schopenhauer, it is often claimed, was pessimistic in both the psychological
and philosophical senses. But even were this claim true, Schopenhauer is not the whole