And I dreamt of Yes!: Pessimism of the will and Pessimism of the strong.
“Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts [. . .]? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual preference for the hard, gruesome, malevolent and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence? Is there perhaps such a thing as suffering from overabundance itself? Is there a tempting bravery in the sharpest eye which demands the terrifying as its foe, as a worthy foe against which it can test its strength and from which it intends to learn the meaning of fear?”. - Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. Ronald Speirs. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. — G. W. F. Hegel, “Preface” to Phenomenology of Spirit
“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” ― Antonio Gramsci, Gramsci’s Prison Letters
“Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them” – Attributed to Diogenes of Sinope by Stobaeus
I am an admitted pessimist, but my gloomy mood is actually rooted in something different from the caustic cynicism that has dominated the past two decades of popular entertainment. This is frustrating because this gloom and ironic gloom is a pessimism that trains be to identity as positively what they should probably reject in themselves. The writers at the rather enigmatic blogger at Spass ohne Grenzen cut to what I like to call “pessimism” of the will, which masks itself as an ideology of the gleeful ,ironic every-man:
I’m so intensely tired of cynicism, and particularly with the ways new entertainment encourages emotional atrophy by proliferating the archetype of the apathetic pseudo-anti-hero to normalize feelings of isolation so people can go, “hey I feel like shit too!” Here’s lookin at you Louis C.K. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the guy, but maybe if we didn’t have a communal comfort-fest culture making light of isolation, people would feel more motivated to get out of it. It’s as if almost every sitcom in both the United States and the UK are working to relieve people of a guilt that should not be relieved, by giving them something to identify with when they should not be allowed to identify; “Lol that guy has trouble with empathy! It must not be a big deal because I’m laughing about it!” I started watching a Houellebecq film adaptation today and had to turn it off because it’s such a dead end. Maybe the ending would have redeemed it, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. (Don’t get me wrong, I still love the guy.) I try to avoid any itch of negativity like the plague now, and I’d rather be vain than depressed. By this I mean that I’d rather this paragraph contain weak reasoning to get the point across; yes, shows about emotional detachment are “working through” something in our society. I’m indifferent to this argument regardless of its validity because it’s all been going on for so long. It’s the equivalent of Jezebel articles which amount to little more than an effort to make lonely people feel happy and comfortable with themselves just as they are. Go ahead and have that extra cookie, and turn on some Louis while you’re at it.
Pessimism of the intellect is how an intelligent person colors their glasses: they see the world as it is. As studies that depressives are more likely to think critically and be self-honest, optimists live longer. False hopes keeps many people alive, literally. Yet the turn of the gleeful pessimism who makes these faults not seem like faults seems like the most perverse dialectical move: Indeed, it brings the hope to the strange place. Your negative traits aren’t negative and you are fool for seeing them as such is the the implicit ideological impulse in the gap. This move is the inverted Diogenes: the man who bites himself so his friends can ignore their wounds.
So I want to dream Yes to the Nietzsche’s question and ignore this the excuse function that we see in the 1990s irony and the aughts lovable failures. We need to look at things as they with respect that what we should reject. To put Nietzsche into the dialectical mode of Hegel: Amor Fati most be opposed by self-overcoming and sublated into something not yet seen.
But the yes must be larger than this: we can not help but battle the dehumanizing pessimist in our heads but we must not step their. We cannot want to see the world in the a certain way, but must see the world as it is to change it. We should not be merely identifying with social faults and shrugging our shoulders and accepting our fate. Yet that is the tenor of our media these days.
Thought is not enough to overcome anything where it be a cracked means of production or over-eating or the idea of the state. One sees this pessimism of the will from even the likes of Eric Hobshawm. An ethic settling. Of lesser evil. Of gradual reform. Of lessened expectations.
To say the Yes to a better a world, one must see things as they are. One must learn to say no.
Posted on May 1, 2012, in Personal Life, Philosophy and Politics and tagged g w f hegel, nietzsche friedrich. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
Arya Moghadam
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El Mono Liso
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Ross Wolfe
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This is one of the more interesting posts by you that I’ve read. I think a lot about the dilemma of pessimism and optimism.
The odd thing about America is that optimism is so embedded in the culture that there is even a strong optimist tradition in the conservative movement, specifically among evangelicals. It’s an optimism of faith that too often sidesteps the difficult issues of compassion and shared responsibility, instead praising individuality… individual responsibility in the form of selfish greed, individual salvation in disregard of all else, individuality that says YES to all that easy and says NO to all that would challenge the status quo, individuality that makes for great Hollywood movies that inspire us to not think too deeply or question to much.
The reason I think about this is because of how oddly it plays out in the US. I was raised in a liberal church by conservative parents. Unity Church, the religion of my youth, is New Thought Christianity and, although ultra-liberal, it comes out of the evangelical tradition. I deeply understand this American kind of optimism, both in its conservative and liberal forms. I grew up in it. I know what it feels like to hold such a view and see the world through such a lense. My present pessimism is rooted in this type of optimism.
One thing that fascinates me is some of the social science research I’ve seen on pessimism and optimism, although I haven’t looked very far into the research in this area. A study I saw led to two basic conclusions. Pessimists have a more accurate appraisal of the present, both in terms of describing the world and describing themselves. So, go to a pessimist if you want to know reality as it is. However, optimists supposedly are better at changing present conditions, thus making reality move closer toward their unrealistic appraisals. Their ignorance of the present is the starting point of making change. It’s by denying reality that they change reality. That said, when an optimist fails, they will fail gloriously… and it is probably the case that an optimist will fail more often than they will succeed, although the optimist will never admit to this even when the pessimist accurately points out this fact.
I’ve tried to be a good optimist at times in my life, but too much failure led me to nearly become a full-blown pessimist, at moments I have indeed embraced cynicism. Everyone has their limits to how much failure they can handle before their faith is broken. Some people are just lucky enough that life never pushes them to confront that limit… and so they blindly go on holding onto the faith. Despite their ignorance, you have to have a certain amount of respect for such blind faith in the face of so little reason for faith. That is the whole point. There is little reason to hope for a positive future for humanity, but reason never stopped the progress of society. People keep on keepin on… until they can’t. The whole charade has to end at some point. Still, I have a feeling that we humans can keep it going for quite some time.
The greatest challenge is confronted by the reasonable pessimist who can’t quite shake the sense of optimistic possibility. I’m such a person. I see so much potential in human nature and society. How to say YES to what is good and true? But you bring up an equally important question: How to say NO to what is unworthy?
Another question would be, if the pessimism of the will could hypothetically be eliminated on a societal level, what would the consequences be? I think it’s possible that the dialectic between seeing the world “as it is” and “as it ought to be,” or between pessimism and optimism, would be rendered moot on the communal level. As Ben says, optimists are better at changing conditions anyways, so one could imagine the “real pessimists” living alongside the “real optimists,” where change wouldn’t necessarily be dependent on whether one saw the world as others saw it, because there would be a mix of personality types. What clogs up this functionality is those who are “optimistic about pessimism,” because they short-circuit the advantage of being able to “see the world as it is” while still not having any desire to change it.
Plus I think more can be said about the tenor of the media and whether this is *merely* a contemporary issue or whether it is something intrinsic to artistic practice in general. I’m reminded of a Houellebecq quote:
“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
The implication of such an idea is that the “cynical sitcom” is not functionally different than, say, moody existentialist works in the vain of Kafka or Beckett. They all serve to aestheticize- even romanticize- and grant permission to a mood which is unhappy with itself. Regardless of the “reality” of such a psychological sensibility, the mere act of giving a voice to the sensibility grants a catharsis from itself while not actually escaping itself. I don’t mean to take up a vulgar Marcusian position that art is always an obstruction against change, but I think there is an *element* in all art, more or less so depending on the instance, which has already “given up.”
It is interesting how quietist most art for art’s sake ends up being, but art itself being an expression of creative will makes me wonder if there is a problem with confuses Houellebecq quote on consumption of art with its creation, and there seems to be little in the way of truth in Houellebecq too given the number of premodern generals that were poets. But modernist art does seem to exhibit the traits at hand to which the sitcom is the most vulgar form.