Module overview
Philosophical pessimism argues in various ways that life is negative in value, the most extreme position being that it would have been better not to have existed. It provides a challenge to many philosophical and commonsense assumptions about value. In the 17th and 18th centuries thinkers such as Bayle, Hume, and Voltaire had begun to develop pessimist views and were opposed by Leibniz’s optimism in Theodicy (1710). Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is regarded as the most serious systematic exponent of pessimism. He focuses on the suffering and unfulfillment of desires that characterize life, and controversially interprets Christianity and Buddhism as essentially pessimistic religions. Both Schopenhauer and Buddhism, however, offer a positive solution to suffering through a transformation in consciousness. Schopenhauer’s work influenced a German school of idiosyncratic pessimists in the late 19th century. In this climate, Nietzsche took on some aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in his early work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), but in later works argued for an attitude of ‘saying Yes to life’, disputing the negative value of suffering. In contemporary philosophy, David Benatar’s anti-natalism has revived the view that existing is always worse than non-existing, arguing that we should not bring new human beings into existence.