Schopenhaurian Pessimism

I sometimes wonder how other people cope with bouts of depressing Schopenhaurian pessimism. It’s not easy to bring this sort of stuff up in casual conversation. It’s even less easy to experience. But for my own therapeutic purposes, I’m going to point here to a few fundamentals of the condition I’m referring to. In the first place, I identified it with Schopenhauer because he was both a cosmic pessimist and a man who had high regard for the ‘will’, which I would narrow here to simply ‘my human will’. Like many Christian theologians and mystics – including, I’d venture, both Jesus himself and St. Paul – Schopenhauer came to the verdict that individual wills need to realise their true position within a wider totality of (cosmic) Will. Not an easy thing to do, we can safely say, if even Jesus found himself struggling to do it – recall his diligent praying and conversation with God before his renewed assurance to carry out his purpose (‘not my will, but thine’) was attained. Whereas the Will of Jesus’ father had as its end goodness/good – we must surely think so?! – the Will of Schopenhauer’s universe is a malevolent beast which runs ‘the show’ without recourse to any higher principle than the perpetration of evil, pure and cynical. Or at least that’s the rather scary conclusion I understand the old fellow to have come to. An interesting thing about this picture is that it links a – or even the – central analytical category of academic psychology, the Will, with a theological disposition. Of course, many philosophers have done precisely this, and in other ways, but it’s worth noting all the same that Schopenhauer makes this connection because he makes it more directly than most (as, of course, did Nietzsche).

The sense that it is appropriate to join Schopenhauer arises, I think, from the sense that Christianity’s own ways of coping with the questions at stake are found wanting by comparison. The sense, for example, that St. Paul’s realisation of his wretchedness, of the sorry and profound limitedness of his own will-power, does something apart from testify to us of our persistent and unending failure to live up to (or even fully to recognise) what we know to be true and good. What this wretchedness can instead speak of, perhaps, is a worldview which would find even unChristian Manichaeism optimistic: a dark, dark, evil place in which souls are interred, and in which they are blind even to the extent that they cannot so much as recognise what is truly good in order to feel deficient in relation to it. Whereas Paul can feel himself at least to ‘know’ good, albeit somewhat inexactly, any such knowledge in the Schopenhaurian universe would be mere delusion: true ‘goodness’ is not just unattainable, as Paul felt it to be: it is non-existent. In the darkness which instead predominates, all that is is evil, or, at least, we cannot be sure that it is not. In this world, it is St. Paul’s mistaken sense of truth, and not just his anguish, which testifies to his fraught, failed humanness which exists only in the context of gloom, gloom, gloom.

What might speak to us in this darkness to communicate the presence of truth, of good or goodness, of beauty and love, in such a way that we can feel confident to identify them? Schopenhauer answers ‘nothing’, as does the depressing pessimism I have named after him. Christianity answers ‘the body of Christ’ in its relation to his people, the people of ‘Israel’. And in reality, this answer ought to be recognised, I think, as something of a ‘shot in the dark’ – and I mean here the important double sense of this phrase, in its denoting a ‘shot of light’ as well as its more usual meaning of ‘a high stakes gamble’. This ‘shot’ is, perhaps, something – and, it might be admitted – something precious indeed in an often dismal, cruel, arbitrary world.

The best therapy I can think of for the Schopenhaurian affliction is of the simplest sort. It is to take an ever higher view of all in the universe which we can feel passionately to be beautiful, true, good, just and right. The key thing here is that the degree of our passion must depend upon the extent to which these characteristics can be thought truly to lie together in any given belief or practice. Which, I suppose, means I am saying that something will be all the more ‘just’ only if it is all the more true, all the more good, all the more right, all the more beautiful. And I am saying the same by extension of all of the concepts just mentioned in their relations to one another. The concepts are best regarded as working together, rather than in isolation, I think. The idea here is that they might serve mutually to strengthen one another and to move towards a harmony of relations, so that we have no justice which is not right and true and good. What ‘justice’ would it be if it were not these, after all?

It is, in any case, to the extent that these phenomena can be thought to strengthen one another in an ever progressing unity that they can (perhaps) more effectively combat the threat of Schopenhaurian affliction, when it comes around – and it will continue to come around, I suspect, until their unification is full and complete. If, moreover, true love is characterised by the total and complete and full unity of these phenomena, then it is right for the Christian to speak of his longing for the eventual, complete realisation of true love. And he must be emboldened to hope for the truth of his gospel – namely, that this true love has already been made known to him as a ‘shot in the dark’, during the course of its being made complete. And this, finally, brings me back to something I said right at the beginning: that it is not easy talking with other people about one’s bouts of Schopenhaurian pessimism. I think, though, that when it seems appropriate, it is necessary to try. For pessimism struggles to remain pessimistic, perhaps, if it can open itself in communication. For if communication in its very nature implies the presumption that the apprehension of greater truths is possible through its agency, then one can perhaps hope that along with the greater truths it might yield may come also greater justice, greater beauty and greater good. One can only but hope. I wonder what Schopenhauer would say.

This Blog

The title of this blog is borrowed from a wonderful book on the scriptural exegesis of the 3rd century Christian thinker, Origen of Alexandria, by Henri de Lubac. It is intended in its present context to refer to attempts to speak about spiritual meaning in the context of human history. These attempts can take on a variety of guises, as de Lubac himself knew well. They can be strictly historicizing in character, which is to say that they can seek merely to explain the ways in which past people understood the meaning of past happenings in light of their spiritual ideas. Or they can take on a more presentist philosophico-theological tenor and begin to speak of how people in our own world might understand the past - either as a whole, or in respect of single events or experiences. Each of these areas of thought will be mentioned in entries to this page, which will touch upon the ideas of a range of thinkers, past and present. Both areas of thought matter. They might even relate to each other in an important way.

Even if one is not a historian or a philosopher of history or a theologian, everybody adopts ways of thinking about matters pertaining to history and spirit, whether as a result of reflection or not. Although there is no reason to suppose that reflection alone is conducive to the accurate portrayal of the past or to the accessing of correct modes of thinking about it, I don't think it can hurt in either case. My own feeling is that without reflection, historical thinking rapidly becomes unfaithful to its past objects and presentist in character. Some people don't think the potential for such infidelity and (naive?) presentism to be a problem. But I am inclined to suppose that it must be. Why should I remain unopposed to the loss of information and perspective on our ancestors and on the world which shaped ours? I can foresee that good answers to this question could be conceived. What, for example, if moving away from more strictly historicizing modes of thinking about the past could lead in our present-day society to greater levels of equality, welfare and value in people's lives? It's a good question, and if we could be sure that a positive answer to it were possible, a genuine case could be made of its strength. In the absence of relevant or sufficient information, however, there is no reason to let it win the matter. I trust that there remains, then, a moral case - or, at least, moral potential - for historical thinking, at least, that is, of a certain kind. I am not at all arguing for the validity of Hegelian historicism or any other such philosophy of history, although I certainly don't dissent from the view that (forms of) such philosophies of history are possible (and perhaps even worthwhile).

As for spiritual thinking, this is a kind of thinking which tends to speak positively of reflection. Certainly, most 'spiritual' thought has wanted to privilege certain kinds of reflection and to abandon others. Against this, my own view is that 'spiritual' thinking - and it is a good question what exactly might be said to characterise 'spiritual' thinking - must be open to honest reflection on all things. Maybe the posts of this blog will bear that view out and go some way to support it. For I certainly cannot speak from my own experience of the kind of prayer, the kind of worship and the kind of 'spiritual' life which in principle refuses to meditate on certain issues, no matter how difficult or arcane they might seem to some (or even to myself). Everything in my experience has to be left open to reflection and this is almost itself an article of faith, I suppose. No corner of the universe can be ciphered off and dismissed as irrelevant. Radical openness, and the potential for continuing questioning about truth and meaning on all fronts. Answers are important too, of course. I will end this first post by confessing my own dedication to the idea that a lowly crucified rabbi offers more of those than an educated Platonism. Cause, then, for further reflection - at least for me.