Look on the Dark Side, Mara van der Lugt on Pessimism

 

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a group of Western philosophers came to clashes, on the page at least, over the age-old problem of evil: the question of how a good God could allow the existence of evil and suffering in the world. Philosophers such as Pierre Bayle, Nicolas Malebranche and G W Leibniz, later followed by such pillars of the canon as Voltaire, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, vehemently disagreed not only on how the problem could be solved – if it could be solved at all – but also on how to speak of such dark matters.
 
Some of these arguments of ‘theodicy’ (the attempt to justify creation) may seem antiquarian to modern eyes – but in an age where young people question the morality of bringing new children into the world, they are surprisingly relevant. After all, the issue is not just about God: it is about creation and, more specifically, the extent to which creation can be justified, given the ills or ‘evils’ that are in the world.
 
The question of creation is urgent for us today. Considering the great uncertainties of the climate crisis, is it justified to create new people, not knowing what kind of future lies ahead of them? And if it is justified, is there any point at which it ceases to be? Most people would probably agree that some worlds are imaginable in which creation would be immoral. At what precise point is life too bad, or too uncertain, to pass on?
 
In the early Enlightenment, of course, there were no such concerns for the future of the planet. But there were evils in existence – plenty of them. Crimes, misfortunes, death, disease, earthquakes and the sheer vicissitudes of life. Considering such evils, these philosophers asked, can existence still be justified?
 
This longstanding philosophical debate is where we get the terms ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’, which are so much used, and perhaps overused, in our modern culture. ‘Optimism’ was the phrase coined by the Jesuits for philosophers such as Leibniz, with his notion that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (for surely, if God could have created a better one, he would have done so). ‘Pessimism’ followed not long afterwards to denote philosophers such as Voltaire, whose novel Candide (1759) ridiculed Leibnizian optimism by contrasting it with the many evils in the world. ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds,’ Voltaire’s hero asks, ‘what on earth are the others like?’
 
But really, Voltaire wasn’t much of a pessimist: other philosophers such as Bayle and Hume went much further in their demonstrations of the badness of existence. For Bayle, and for Hume after him, the point is not just that the evils of life outnumber the goods (though they believe this is also the case), but that they outweigh them. A life might consist of an equal number of good moments and bad moments: the problem is that the bad moments tend to have an intensity that upsets the scales. A small period of badness, says Bayle, has the power to ruin a large amount of good, just like a small portion of seawater can salt a barrel of fresh water. Similarly, one hour of deep sorrow contains more evil than there is good in six or seven pleasant days.

 
Against that bleak vision, thinkers such as Leibniz and Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasised the goods of life, and the power we have to seek out the good in all things, for if we learned to adjust our vision we would see that life is in fact very good: that ‘there is incomparably more good than evil in the life of men, as there are incomparably more houses than prisons,’ Leibniz writes, and that the world ‘will serve us if we use it for our service; we shall be happy in it if we wish to be.’ Just as the pessimists believed the optimists were deceived in their insistence on the goods of life, so too the optimists thought the pessimists’ eyes were skewed towards the bad: each side accused the other of not having the right vision.
 
A large part of the question thus became: what is the right vision?
 
One thing that struck me as I dug deeper into these questions was how concerned both the optimists and the pessimists were with the ethical assumptions underlying the theoretical arguments. On the surface, the question was: can creation be justified? But beneath it, never far removed, lay a deeper question, a question just as ethically and emotionally imbued: how to speak of suffering in a way that offers hope and consolation?
 
There is not just a theoretical, but also a moral objection that each side makes against the other. The great objection that the pessimists lay at the feet of the optimists is that to insist that life is good even in the face of hard, unyielding suffering, or to stipulate that we are in control of our happiness, that we shall be happy ‘if we wish to be’ – that this is to make our suffering worse. It is to add to suffering the responsibility for that suffering; it is to burden the sufferer with a sense of their inadequacy. If life is so good, then the sufferer’s trials must be a case of wrong vision – and indeed the optimists tend to say things just like that. This is why optimism, so say the pessimists, is a cruel philosophy. If it gains us some hope, it fails in consolation.
 
But on their side, the optimists prove to be similarly concerned. Their objection to the pessimists is that, if we insist on the intensity and ubiquity and inescapability of suffering, if we describe it in all its depths and bleakness (as the pessimists indeed are wont to do), this heaps suffering on suffering – and it is this that makes suffering worse, as ‘evils are doubled by being given an attention that ought to be averted from them,’ as Leibniz says.
 
Pessimism, so say the optimists, is itself unconsoling – but more than that, it is unhopeful.
 
The question concerning these philosophers, then, is not just the theoretical one about whether life in general is good or bad, but also a more concrete one: face to face with one who suffers, what can philosophy bring to the table? What can philosophy offer in the way of hope and consolation?
 
Both strands of thought have the same aim, but they plot different routes to get there: the pessimists offer consolation by emphasising our fragility, by recognising that no matter how hard we try, we may fail to achieve happiness, for no fault of our own. Meanwhile, the optimists seek to unfold hope by emphasising our capacity, by insisting that no matter how dark, how bleak our circumstances, we can always change our vision and direction, we can always aim for better.
 
Of course, there is no reason in principle why both roads could not be combined, each to serve as the necessary counterpart for the other, an antidote for the poison each draught may become when served up undiluted. But the fact remains that these earliest optimists and pessimists saw them as opposed – and in fact we do too: we still have the tendency to think in binary terms, as if there is in life a stark choice to be made between optimism and pessimism, or, in Noam Chomsky’s words, for optimism or despair:
 
“We have two choices. We can be pessimistic, give up, and help ensure that the worst will happen. Or we can be optimistic, grasp the opportunities that surely exist, and maybe help make the world a better place. Not much of a choice.”
 
That last example itself makes manifest the coarseness and onesidedness of our use of these terms. Optimism tends to be positively charged, pessimism negatively charged. When we call someone an optimist, it’s usually praise. This is why politicians are particularly keen to insist that they are optimists, or even to speak of a ‘duty of optimism’. Conversely, to call someone a pessimist is usually to deride, denounce, deflate them. ‘Pessimism is for losers,’ as one recent book title has it.
 
But are our choices so dichotomous? If there are shadows on the road of pessimism, there are dangers on the opposite road also. And these are the very dangers that those older pessimists kept warning us against: that if we overemphasise the power we have over our minds, our lives, our destinies, it is all too easy to stumble into cruelty.
 
We need not look very far to see examples of what optimism, in its darkest forms, can become. When a 2008 London tower block named Heygate Estate was sold off to foreign investors, its inhabitants were first evicted then offered mindfulness courses by the local council to deal with their anxiety, so that they were themselves made responsible for their misfortunes. If we are each radically in control of our mental states, what reason is there to ask for social justice? This is the shadow-side that cleaves to the popular narrative that ‘you are responsible for your own happiness’, and is bolstered by the subtle terror of a social media regime that pushes us to broadcast our success and happiness to the world.
 
It is in such cases that the consoling force of pessimism reveals itself: it’s OK to not be OK. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we run up against the hard walls of our own capacities or the world’s boundaries – and it can be consoling to be reminded that our suffering, our fragility, is not our fault. That we suffer despite ourselves. That it can be right to grieve for what we are losing, or are yet to lose, or have already lost.
 
We are so quick to equate pessimism with passivity or fatalism or despair, and to reject it on that basis – for, of course, we do not want a philosophy that tells us to give up. But is that really what pessimism means? As Joshua Foa Dienstag argued in his book Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006), far from leading to passivity, pessimism can be closely linked to a tradition of moral and political activism, as in the case of Albert Camus, whose courage and activism in the Second World War were infused by his pessimistic views.
 
Even the darkest pessimists never said that life would only get worse or can never be better: this is a caricature of pessimism, sketched quickly to dismiss it. Arthur Schopenhauer, the bleakest of them all, did not subscribe to it. On the contrary, he suggested that it is precisely because we cannot control the course of things that we can never know what the future holds: life may become worse or better. ‘The pessimist,’ in Dienstag’s words, ‘expects nothing.’ There is not much hope in this, perhaps, but it is a kind of hope nevertheless. And so too is the faint glimmering that can be found amid the darkest pages of these writers: the quick unquiet intuition that something can be gathered in the black vision; that our eyes may be opened in ways they were not before; that we may see in the darkness.
 
It is why hopeful pessimism may not be a contradiction, but a manifestation of the wild power that is harnessed only when life’s darkest forces are gathered into the strange alchemy of hope.
 
I think about these things in this age marked by ecological depletion and devastation, by floods and fires and heat ceilings that no one had thought possible, by the spectre of the climate crisis that takes shape all around us. This age is marked also by the quiet, or not so quiet, desperation of the young. The same criticisms once waged against the pessimists of yore are now laid at the feet of the despairing young by those techno-optimists and advocates of progress for whom any consideration of the mere possibility of decline is itself a sign of weakness, a lack of imagination, a moral flaw – a failure of vision, most of all. And so they denounce young people’s outcry as pessimism, as fatalism, as ‘mere’ despair. They criticise them for the bleakness of their vision, call their statements exaggerated and the speakers spoiled.
 
It is all too easy to miss the fact that this generation – the first to grow up in a world where a climate emergency is not just on the horizon, but a stark reality – is haunted by a real sense of losing the future, as all the things they have been told give life meaning are rendered either pointless or problematic. Things like: study, get a good job, settle down – but what jobs are still certain? Where will it be safe to settle down? As Greta Thunberg said in Parliament Square in London in 2018: ‘And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future?’ Things like: start a family – but if there is no future for one’s children, is it still OK to procreate? Even more trivial things, like developing oneself by travelling, are no longer straightforward: for how important is self-development when weighed against the carbon cost of modern travel?
 

This is a wholesale collapse of meaning that is only now becoming clear to us. There is a very real sense in which young people are experiencing not only the loss of concepts, but the loss of the future itself, as all the usual answers to the question of what makes life worthwhile become increasingly uncertain. They are in that darkness, searching for some kind of hope, some kind of consolation – and what can we offer them? Surely we can do better than give the manifestly inadequate answer (which may also be an outright lie) to assure them that all will be well – since we know there is every chance it won’t be.
 
Any crude statements of optimism would be more than misplaced: it would be the kind of lie that deceives no one, least of all the sharpened moral senses of the young, who see through the empty promises and reassurances of politicians with an anger we know is justified. If we told them that everything will be OK, these are less than empty words: they are a failure to take their experience seriously, and that, as the pessimists would tell us, is the one thing guaranteed to make their suffering worse.
 
But if brute optimism fails – could pessimism do better? I have suggested that pessimism can have value – but could we go further? Could it be, in fact, a virtue?
 
To some, the very notion of a virtue of pessimism may seem absurd. For instance, we may subscribe to Hume’s notion that the mark of any virtue is that it is useful and agreeable, either to the person who possesses it or to others. But surely pessimism is neither useful nor agreeable. It is not useful, the argument goes, because it renders us passive, depresses not only ourselves but ‘our sense of the possible’, as Marilynne Robinson has said of cultural pessimism in particular. And it is not agreeable, since it intensifies our suffering, making us focus on the bad side of life rather than the good (or so arch-optimists such as Leibniz and Rousseau would have it). It is not surprising, then, that certain studies of supposed ‘moral exemplars’ identified positivity, hopefulness and optimism among the characteristics that such exemplars had in common.
 
But then, think of Greta Thunberg. If there is such a thing as a ‘climate virtue’, she would seem to exemplify it – considering the hard personal choices that she has made, the steadfastness of her vision, and the courage with which she holds world leaders to account and takes them to task for their half-heartedness, their unwillingness to commit fully to the cause. If this is not an exercise of virtues, then I don’t know what is – and yet there is nothing positive or optimistic about Thunberg. If there is hope, it’s a dark, bleak hope, full of rage and grief and pain for what is being lost – but infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination. It is clear that this activist, at least, will continue to strive even if her efforts are doomed to fail. This is not optimism: if anything, it is a hopeful pessimism, and I believe it has every right to be called a virtue in our age.
 
Hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism. It is this attitude, this perspective that is exemplified in Thunberg and other figures who by their example give an affirmative answer to the question posed by Paul Kingsnorth: ‘Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?’
 
The thing to avoid is not so much pessimism, but hopelessness or fatalism or giving up. Even despair need not be completely avoided, since it too can energise and encourage us to strive for change, but we should avoid the kind of despair that causes us to collapse. These things are not the same as pessimism, which is simply the assumption of a dark view of the present as well as the future and does not imply the loss of courage or insistence to strive for better: on the contrary, often these are the very gifts that pessimism can bestow.
 
One can be deeply, darkly pessimistic, one can find oneself in the cold hard clutches of despair, and yet not be depleted of the possibility (and it could just be a possibility) that better may yet arrive. This is a kind of hope that is dearly bought, that does not come lightly but is carved out of a painful vision which may just be the acknowledgment of all the suffering that life can and does hold. If anything, the pessimists have taught me this: that with eyes full of that darkness there can still be this strange shattering openness, like a door cracked open, for the good to make its entry into life. Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future, and so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse.
 
This can itself be a moral stance: one that welcomes the good when it is given and urges it onwards on its journey, but also acknowledges the bad without explaining it away or overburdening the will of those it crushes in its path. Sometimes we are not in power to change the world as we would like to, and acknowledging this can be the greatest effort as well as the greatest consolation, while not taking away the drive to give our best and hardest labours to the cause.
 
As Jonathan Lear has written in his book Radical Hope (2006), one common phenomenon at times of cultural devastation is that old values lose their meaning. If they are to survive the collapse of the moral horizon, they need new meanings, new concepts to breathe life into them. The most difficult thing of all is to negotiate this change, to start inhabiting new virtues while the old are still among us. And this, I believe, is one way in which pessimism might serve us – as a virtue in itself, but also as a way of giving new meaning to virtues that are changing as part of this changing world. To behold with open eyes the reality before us requires courage, and not to turn away from it, forbearance, and yet not to decide that it ends there: this is hope.
 
Hope – not that everything will be all right in the end, but that nothing has ever truly ended; that there is this ‘crack in everything’ of which Leonard Cohen once sang, in the good as well as the bad, so that neither is ever entirely shut away from us. This is not the steadfast conviction that things are bound to get better – not the crude optimism that can no longer be a virtue in a breaking world, and might prove to be our besetting vice. It may be easier to lend our efforts under such a banner of assured success, but this ease is a deceptive one, for while it is possible to be dispirited by passivity or fatalism, it is possible to be depleted by continued disappointment also. What hopeful pessimism asks instead is that we strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change. This may just be the thinnest hope, the bleakest consolation – but it may also be the very thing that will serve us best in times to come, as a value, and yes, an exercise of moral fervour: a fragile virtue for a fragile age.     
 
Look on the dark  side. By Mara van der Lugt. Aeon  , April 26, 2022.

“We have two choices. We can be pessimistic, give up, and help ensure that the worst

will happen. Or we can be optimistic, grasp the opportunities that surely exist, and maybe help make the world a better place. Not much of a choice.” Noam Chomsky
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In an age marked by such overwhelming cause for concern for the state of the planet and the future of mankind as ours, the word pessimism has received a surprising amount of bad press.
 
Noam Chomsky, in the tellingly titled collection Optimism over Despair, puts the question of optimism and pessimism as something of a forking path: we can either be optimistic about the possibilities for the future, or we can be pessimistic, i.e. desperate, i.e. just “give up”. Similarly, and almost simultaneously, Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now makes his plea for the belief in progress against what he sees as a widespread current of “pessimism”, or a belief in cultural decline. Musing from another angle, Marilynne Robinson strikes out against the “always fashionable” phenomenon of cultural pessimism, which has the “negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible”, or even of “encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat.” Even the unborn baby in Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell sagely points out that pessimism is no less than an intellectual weakness, a refusal to see that things have never been better than in modern-day Western society: “Pessimism is too easy…”
 
It is generally a good idea to be at least mildly sceptical when encountering such sweeping statements, such denunciations of what is obviously or evidently a widespread fad­ – and we should be all the more suspicious when no convincing examples are given of a phenomenon of which we are all supposed to be so acutely aware. After all: who, these days, calls themselves a pessimist with any conviction? Where are these black-minded doomsaying pessimist throngs? When was pessimism ever a thing that was “in vogue”? And who says that pessimism is the same thing as believing in decline or resigning in despair?
 
It is in fact much more difficult to find a self-proclaimed pessimist than a self-proclaimed optimist, whether in politics, philosophy, science or everyday life, and the few examples we can find are hardly ever straightforward cases. Thus John Gray, perhaps the philosopher most notorious for his pessimism, will not take on the term without qualification: “I am hopefully pessimistic”, he says on the BBC-programme Desert Island Discs. This caution, this tentative nature of his self-description, and the very adjective he chooses to moderate it, are each telling: they reveal what pessimism is often accused of and has to defend against. But the things we most often associate with pessimism are far removed from what it really is; they are based on a mixture of misgivings, prejudices, and concerns that fail to do it justice. For the truth is that pessimism, or the philosophy properly known as pessimism, was never attractive, never popular, and never, ever easy. The truth is also that pessimism represents a much richer, deeper, and more interesting view on life than the dulled-down version lets us see. Furthermore, not only does this shallow glance on pessimism dull the truth of pessimism, but it does the same for the contrary doctrine known as optimism.
 
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So, what are optimism and pessimism? The standard view is that these terms simply refer to our chosen expectations about the future: an optimist believes things will get better; a pessimist believes things will get worse. Aside from the fact that this definition gets pessimism (as well as optimism) wrong in important ways, the main problem with this representation of both optimism and pessimism is that it sets the latter up for failure. If the two outlooks are supposed to tell us what we can expect, and therefore what we can hope for from the future, then optimism obviously wins, on moral grounds. The intuition is that pessimism leads to despair, which will in turn lead to resignation: to giving up. These, again, are Chomsky’s alternatives: we can choose either optimism or despair (that is: pessimism). If this is indeed the choice before us, then Chomsky is right, and ethics itself moves against pessimism. We ought not to be pessimists if to be a pessimist means giving up on our common future, and on our fellow man.
 
So much for the intuition; now for the facts. Do pessimists actually believe their outlook commits them to resignation? Far from it: in fact, in many cases, the opposite is true. Joshua Foa Dienstag has devoted an entire book to arguing that there is a pessimist tradition of political thought, and that pessimism can be a source of powerful political engagement. How else could we explain the fact that one of pessimism’s pivotal figures, Albert Camus, was also one of the most politically committed philosophers in Western thought?
 
The problem with the common-sense view of pessimism is that it relies on a mistaken conception of what pessimism, in its deepest and most significant manifestations, really is. Far from resting in a belief that things are going to get worse, pessimism in most cases doesn’t have to do with the future at all: rather, it is a philosophy that tries to give a place to the darker side of life, to the reality of evil and pain and suffering in human (as well as animal) existence. Furthermore, insofar as pessimism is oriented on a view towards the future, most philosophical pessimists will tell you that to be a pessimist is not to expect the worst, but rather to expect nothing at all. Pessimism has to do rather with a limitation of what we can possibly know about what life has in store for us. It is, therefore, not at all a positive belief in decline, but rather a negative belief, a refusal to believe that progress is a given. Thus, to those people who would cleverly say “I’m not a pessimist or an optimist: I am a realist”, the pessimists could answer that this is just another way of saying they are a pessimist, in that they suspend judgment on the question of what is or is not going to happen.
 
But this view cast upon the future is only a secondary and derivative part of what philosophical pessimism is at its most ardent and most interesting: an attempt to paint an alternative picture of the reality of human life. This, not the caricature we have become accustomed to, is the beating heart of pessimism. It is also its original conception.
 
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A quick turning back of history’s pages tells us that the terms optimism and pessimism first came into being in the early eighteenth century. This happened in the heat of the philosophical debate on the problem of evil: the question of how an all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful God could permit the many evils and sufferings of existence.
 
Interestingly, both terms were originally pejorative and oppositional in nature: they were coined as ways of putting down the opposing philosophy, and this derogatory nature still clings to them. (To this day, a person can still be discredited by being called a pessimist, or even, in some contexts, an optimist). Optimism was the first to be coined, by the Jesuits, to deride Leibniz’s famous system that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” – and it was the Jesuits too who coined pessimism as a name for the opposing view. But it was Voltaire’s famous Candide, or Optimism that ensured the worldwide success of this term, pessimism following only slowly in its footsteps.
 
Now if we look at what both terms meant philosophically, this was to do with a set of existential questions, such as: Do the goods of existence outweigh its evils? Is life worth living? Would it have been better for some people, or most people, or any people, never to have existed? Very roughly sketched, on the one hand, the “optimists” (such as Leibniz and, most fervently, Alexander Pope), argued that life is on the whole good, that God’s creation is therefore justified, and so the evils of existence don’t form an argument against the goodness, let alone the existence of God. On the other hand, the “pessimists” (such as Voltaire and David Hume) argued that the optimists failed to give sufficient weight to the depth of human misery: not only is it the case that the evils outnumber the goods of life, but the evils carry more weight – they matter more when we make up the balances. One hour of real suffering, said philosopher Pierre Bayle, is enough to tip the scales over five or six comfortable days. Therefore, considering the dreadful potential of human misery, the terrible extremes to which suffering may reach, existence is a wager that ought not to have been made. Better no existence, argued the most dark-minded of these philosophers, than an existence in which suffering could take such horrific forms. And we all know, they hinted, what the implications are for Whoever has created us this way.
 
This, in a nutshell, is the theoretical question of optimism versus pessimism. However, behind the theory there stands a profound ethical impulse, one that is equally active on both sides of the debate.
 
The reason the pessimists object so vehemently to the system of optimism (according to which the parts may suffer but the whole is good) is that it neglects the reality of suffering, or worse, explains it away. For instance, the optimists argue that we suffer because we have sinned, or we suffer because pain is useful to us, or we suffer by our own choice, since we have the power to rise beyond our suffering. The ethical drive of pessimism is that this is no way to speak of human experience: that this implies a failure in compassion for our fellow sufferers, or even that it can serve to make their suffering worse. No consolation could be less welcome than to be told, in your suffering, that you suffer pointlessly; that you suffer through your own doing. This, say the pessimists, is to double suffering with guilt.
 
On the other hand, the optimists too are driven by an ethical motivation, their argument being that pessimists exaggerate human suffering and so it is they who make suffering worse, by adding to the fact of suffering a reflection upon that suffering. The pessimists are now accused not only of ingratitude to their creator, but of moral weakness: here already is the view that there is something desperate and immoral about pessimism; that it is a failure of the will.
 
This moral concern on either side is, on my view, precisely what saves both philosophies: it gives them an integrity that they would lack as merely abstract considerations. It manifests a sense of engagement that takes several forms throughout the tradition, revealing itself fully in the question of how to speak sensitively and considerately of human suffering: how to find a language of compassion and consolation that nevertheless does justice to the breadth of our experiences. It is also what gives coherence to both traditions, which are defined precisely by their ethical opposition to each other. Thus what Voltaire and Rousseau, in their famous clash over the Lisbon earthquake, are really arguing about is not the abstract philosophical question of whether we live in the best of all possible worlds, but the proper grounding of consolation as well as hope. The last word of Voltaire’s Poem on the Lisbon Disaster is, famously, espérance.
 
It is, then, tragic, that throughout the history of philosophy, and up to the current day, both traditions have failed to recognize this ethical drive in the opponent, and to take the opposing philosophy truly seriously. Hence the division that continues today in even the most commonsensical uses of the terms optimism and pessimism; hence also the caricatures that have resulted on both sides, and especially those associated with pessimism.
 
And yet the person most responsible for pessimism’s bad name is also the philosopher whose name is most closely associated with pessimism: that arch-pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer.
 
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The reason for this is that Schopenhauer, in his argument that life is marked deeply and principally by suffering, to the extent that suffering is the very end of life, leads us to the exact conclusion that latter-day pessimists are most eager to avoid: that we should cease to affirm life, and turn instead to resignation. In order to achieve “salvation”, on Schopenhauer’s view, we must radically turn away from this existence, which means turning from our pleasures as well our pains. We must give up happiness as our ideal, and go beyond ourselves, our desires, and especially our will, in order to go beyond the world.
 
 This kind of resignation, haunted as it is by dark ascetic musings, seems to confirm precisely that intuitive conception of pessimism as a kind of hopelessness, a philosophy of giving up. It also raises two questions that strike at the heart of pessimism’s bad reputation. First, doesn’t this kind of philosophical gloom make for a very potent argument for suicide? Second, doesn’t it mean we should just stop caring about anything, including our fellow man? These are the kinds of questions that have resulted in a bad name for not only Schopenhauer’s particular brand of pessimism, but for pessimism more generally. And yet Schopenhauer was the first to answer these questions in ways that should be enough to change our minds.
 
First of all: his is not an argument for suicide. Suicide, says Schopenhauer, is not an answer to the problem posed by existence. An awareness of the reality of pessimism should place us on a path of philosophical and spiritual enlightenment, in which we learn to understand the illusory nature of most of our knowledge and even of our own identities: of that which distinguishes us from other people. Pessimism is meant to help us find some kind of consolation in the fact that our suffering is not accidental and is not exceptional, but is an intrinsic part of our existence in this world. True resignation, for Schopenhauer, is an attempt to achieve salvation by conquering ourselves, which can only be done by living in acknowledgment of our human condition, not by choosing death instead (though what precisely is meant here by “salvation” remains somewhat mysterious).
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It is yet another misconception clinging to pessimism that its proponents must be pro-suicide. This is not the case even in that philosopher who famously argued that suicide is the most important philosophical question, Albert Camus. On the contrary, the canonical philosophers of pessimism give argument upon argument against suicide – but unlike most arguments against suicide, which make this case in moralistic or legalistic or theological terms, the pessimists’ arguments are deeply sensitive to the experience that informs the act, in all its tragic complexity and profundity. Their arguments distinguish themselves in that, more often than not, they are formulated from the inside of this experience, rather than from the outside, looking in. Theirs is an awareness that suicide tells us something about the darkest corners of existence and about the depths of human suffering. It is, in their eyes, not at all an action to be recommended, but an experience to be taken seriously.
 
As for the second question, far from making ethics impossible, Schopenhauer wants his argument to be a foundation for ethics: there is perhaps no philosopher who has given as much weight to the ethical mechanism of sympathy or compassion as Arthur Schopenhauer. His central idea is that, by going beyond our individual wills and pursuing an ethic of personal resignation, we will recognize that deep down we are all connected by a reality that is greater and stronger than our individual identities; hence I will recognize your suffering as my suffering, you will recognize mine as yours, and we will all want to do what we can to reduce the suffering we see in the (human as well as animal) world. It thus becomes impossible to turn away from suffering on the grounds that it isn’t I who suffer: for Schopenhauer, identity and individuality are illusory, so that a single creature’s suffering properly belongs to all creatures. While optimism, for Schopenhauer, entrenches us in our personal interests and desires and makes us insensitive to the suffering of others, pessimism grounds an ethic of extreme compassion, of suffering-with and feeling-with the other. Far from a glorification of suffering, it is an extremely compassionate philosophy. True “goodness of heart”, says Schopenhauer, “identifies all beings with its own nature.”
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Of course, there is still reason to be uncomfortable with almost every aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism, and especially with his ethic of resignation, the giving up of any hope of happiness altogether. Schopenhauer calls this resignation, but it sounds rather like despair.
​
Contrary to this, there is much to be said for an optimist ethic that tells us to look for the good, the lighter side in all things; one that warns us against focusing too much on what Schopenhauer calls “the terrible side of life”, lest we lose heart and hope, lest we forfeit our capacity for goodness and kindness and for joy itself. Such an ethic would remind us that we must always believe, even in the darkest of times, that things can get better – which is a view that Schopenhauer does not allow us, though other pessimists do. This is also what Chomsky is getting at in his eulogy of optimism over despair. The question is whether what he is getting at is really optimism, or rather hope.
​
Could the two not go together, then? Could there be such a thing as hopeful pessimism, as John Gray suggests (which to many of us would seem like an oxymoron) – and could such hopeful pessimism not perform the same tasks as Chomsky’s optimism, and perform them better? I think it can – and should.
​
While it is deeply mistaken to suggest that pessimism is the same as fatalism or giving up, the concern behind this suggestion is nevertheless a valid one. This is the concern, voiced most clearly by Chomsky, that if we become too convinced that things are going to get worse whatever we do, we’ll end up doing nothing at all. But, as I have argued, this is not at all the point of pessimism, properly understood. If even that strand of pessimism most oriented towards resignation (Schopenhauer’s version) retains a profound ethical orientation; if even here the recognition of suffering in the world is tightly linked to the commitment to lessening that suffering – what this tells us about pessimism is that this is a philosophy that sees itself as charged with the highest ethical potential. Far from dissuading us from ethical or political action, the point of pessimism is to motivate us.
​
More importantly, the fatalistic concern raised by Chomsky goes both ways, and cuts optimism with the same blade. If it can be said that pessimism risks demotivation, it could also be said that, if we are too optimistic, too convinced that things will turn out fine in the end, whatever we do, we’ll equally end up doing nothing. Why worry ourselves about a complex problem such as climate change if we already believe everything will sort itself out in the end; that progress will prevail? How is such an attitude more likely to motivate us than one that takes seriously the reality of damage, the reasonableness of due concern?
​
This is of course as unfair a representation of optimism as the opposing view is of pessimism. Again, the point behind both viewpoints and philosophies is their ethical drive: both are directed towards a common orientation, which is to make sense of suffering, to offer hope as well as consolation; and, at least to some extent, to try to improve the human condition insofar as it can be improved. The difference between both traditions resides in the kinds of moral sources that are prioritized. To remain with the example of climate change, the optimists believe we will be best motivated if we draw from humanity’s success stories, such as new technologies and the vast human potential for change and innovation, while not focusing too much on the reasons we have for despair. In contrast to this, the pessimists hold not only that ethics demands we do justice to the reality of suffering and evils (including the possibility of impending disaster), but also that this is exactly what will motivate us to want to make a difference: it is precisely a recognition of the dire state of affairs in the world that is needed to impel us to action. The disagreement, then, is ultimately over what is most capable of morally paralysing us: overemphasizing our capacity or rather our incapacity?
 
 
Throughout the ages, the tension between optimism and pessimism has had to do with the conflicting demands of their double orientation: towards hope and, at the same time, towards consolation. On the one hand, this means to do justice to the reality of human suffering, without which, as especially pessimism recognizes, consolation is impossible. And, on the other, to offer a perspective that opens up new possibilities, new perspectives for the future, without which, as especially optimism recognizes, hope is impossible. This tension rises again and again in literature as well as the history of philosophy. I will point out merely two passages, one as subtle in its optimism as the other is in its pessimism.
​
​The first passage occurs at the end of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where Pierre looks back at his past sufferings and draws from them a lesson that, without discounting or playing down these hardships, nevertheless manages to place them in a wider narrative of hope and meaning:
​
           “They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. “But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God’s sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.”
 
I believe there is great wisdom in this. But I also think this is something we should handle with great caution; something we should not make into too general a point. It is a wonderful thing when out of deep tragedies or great suffering comes “something new and good”; when bad experiences teach us new things, help us to reach beyond ourselves, to grow as persons. Speaking of the value of life, this is surely one of those things that makes life and living valuable to us: this possibility of bad things giving entry to the good. But while we should be deeply grateful when this is the case for us, it is not something we can count on, nor is it something that is dependent on our will. Not all that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Not all suffering gives way to the new and good; not all bad experiences help us to grow. Some diminish us, some tragedies make life stop short in its tracks. Some suffering cuts us off from the attainment of the “new and good”, and, in Hilary Mantel’s words, makes us “foreign to ourselves”:
 
            “All of us can change. All of us can change for the better, at any point. I believe this, but what is certainly true is that we can be made foreign to ourselves, suddenly, by illness, accident, misadventure, or hormonal caprice.”
 
These words are drawn from Mantel’s memoir, Giving up the Ghost, and they comprise the second passage I wanted to mention, which seems to stand as a kind of counterpoint to Tolstoy’s muted optimism: where Pierre counterposed light to darkness, Mantel counterposes darkness to light. My own pessimism, if it deserves the name, rises exactly at this point. I believe, with and perhaps beyond Mantel, that there are those to whom the path of happiness is closed – truly closed. That there are experiences that can cut us off from ourselves and from our very capacity for happiness: from the good and from the true. To recognize this is not to forfeit hope or to give up on such persons, let alone on ourselves: it is rather to acknowledge that this too is life; this too is what it means to be alive.

​
And this is the great risk, the original sin of any overly optimistic description of reality or of the human capacity to flourish: the suggestion that this flourishing is entirely up to us, entirely in our human hands. This very modern ethic has had its most victorious moment at the heart of the American Dream, according to which each of us can (and should) achieve our aspirations, if only we are willing; “you are responsible for your own happiness”. This ethic is echoed in pop culture as it is in many currents of new age spirituality, some of which trace back all our good and bad fortunes, even our illnesses, to our own will and consciousness, thus making each of us starkly responsible for that which in older days would be referred to fate. Whatever befalls us, so say such “philosophies”, does so because we have attracted it. This is also an ethic that fits snugly within the modern Facebook paradigm, where we are supposed (there is a strong ought here) only to show our happiest face, our sunniest side – regardless of whether such a side is real or even possible for us. The pressuring potential of optimism, if wrongly interpreted, reveals itself fully here.
 
While many have surely drawn hope from the belief that our happiness is entirely in our hands, this is not simply a message of hope. It can become an imperative, and as soon as it does, it reveals its ugly side, in this overburdening of the will. This, not incidentally, was precisely what early pessimists such as Bayle and Voltaire were reacting so strongly against: the idea that we are as responsible for our suffering as for our happiness. If this gains us hope, it fails in consolation.
 
                                                                                        ***
 
A few months ago I came across a bench by a beach in Scotland that had black balloons tied to it. The bench itself was dedicated to the memory of a boy who had died one year before that day. There were flowers on the bench, and beside the flowers, a bunch of papers, with hundreds of names of persons, followed by their ages: fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one, thirty-two. On the first page there was a handwritten and touchingly misspelled note, telling us that this was a list of people lost to suicide, and suggesting to us these three things:
 
                        “ Be kind to people.
                         Look out for loved ones.
                         Its ok to not be ok.”
 
And this is what the ethic of pessimism, in its strongest, clearest, cleanest form, most pivotally represents: that “It’s ok to not be ok.” That to make suffering a question primarily of our will is merely to increase suffering, by heaping guilt upon it. That it’s a wonderful thing to live a life rich in wonder, and meaning, and happiness; and we should be deeply grateful if we are so blessed. But that our own happiness should not excuse us either from an awareness of the fragility of life, happiness, and good itself, or from a due consideration and concern for those less fortunate, less blessed, less beloved, or the truly miserable among us, who also walk this world.
 
The message of pessimism is that this, too, is a part of life, and that it deserves a place in our language, our shared experience; that we are not justified, that it is never justified, to close our eyes to that other, darker, “terrible” side of life. This is also the meaning of compassion in the ethic of pessimism, which need not at all be in conflict with optimism, but should stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside it as its necessary complement and companion. As Schopenhauer wrote, this is how deep down we should greet each other, not as Madame or Monsieur, but as “fellow sufferer, compagnon de misère.”
 
                                                                                   ***
 
Noam Chomsky argues for optimism over despair. We might equally, and more meaningfully, argue for hope over optimism.
 
If optimism risks, on the one hand, an overburdening of the will, and on the other, an understatement of the reality of true and dire damage done to the world and to ourselves – could not pessimism serve us better as a moral source? And where pessimism risks stumbling into resignation – could not hope help us to mind the gap? If optimism and pessimism both have their faces turned towards a common goal, could we not find in both the materials by which to travel forwards?
 
Why, then, not a philosophy of hopeful pessimism to guide us into the future?
 
 
Pessimism. By Mara van der Lugt. The Philosopher  October 1, 2019.
 

 

Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering. By Mara van der Lugt
 
An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today.
 
Princeton University Press

Mara van der Lugt, Lecturer at  University of St.Andrews 

The Woman in White

 

On Saturday night, Kristen Stewart attended the 33rd Annual Producers Guild Awards in Los Angeles at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel wearing a dress from Brandon Maxwell. The strapless ivory bridal gown featured a sheer corset bodice with white ribbon boning sewn into the waist. The corset met a wide textured skirt that brushed the red carpet as Stewart posed.
 
The Spencer actress wore her hair up with curls in tendrils around her face. Her makeup was light, with pink eyeshadow for a touch of color and nude lips.
 
During the wards, Stewart presented the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures to the team behind the drama musical film CODA. The award was accepted by the production team including Daniel Durant, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, Sian Heder, guest, Fabrice Gianfermi, Philippe Rousselet and Patrick Wachsberger. They were joined by stars Daniel Durant, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur and Sian Heder.
 
The entire event was star-studded, including Serena Williams and Nick Jonas as other presenters. Other invitees on the list were Josh Brolin, Rachel Brosnahan, Daniel Durant, Alana Haim, Jude Hill, Chris Pine, Daniel Dae Kim, Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin, Ryan Murphy, Simon Rex and Kerry Washington, as well as previously announced presenters Meryl Streep, Casey Bloys, Jamie Dornan, Michelle Yeoh, Aunjanue Ellis, Jung Ho-yeon, Linda Lavin, David Alvarez, Jessica Chastain, Denis Villeneuve, Troy Kotsur, Andrew Garfield, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Steven Spielberg.

 
Stewart's dress seems like a glimpse into her future—the Twilight star is recently engaged to Dylan Meyer. Stewart said that Meyer was the one to pop the question while being interviewed by Howard Stern in early November.
 
“We're marrying, we're totally gonna do it,” Stewart said. “I wanted to be proposed to, so I think I very distinctly carved out what I wanted and she nailed it. We're marrying, it's happening.”
 
Kristen Stewart Wears Sheer Bridal White Corset Dress To Producers Guild Award. By Aimée Lutkin. Elle, March 20, 2022.  

In art, spirituality and protest, a woman wearing white is a powerful symbol. Is she a goddess, a ghost, a "fallen woman" – or something else entirely, asks Beverley D'Silva.
 
She was a vision in a white dress, as she stood, or half floated, before a white curtain. She was an "apparition", enthused the artist Gustave Courbet. No, there was nothing ghostly or unearthly about her, according to the art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary, she was "a woman after her wedding night," he said, leaving no doubt what her rosebud lips and dazzled stare evoked in him. She was "charming" felt the poet Charles Baudelaire. While art historian Paul Mantz wondered: "What does she want with her loose hair, her big eyes drowned in ecstasy, her languid attitude?"
 
The "she" invoking these notable reactions was the subject of The White Girl, a masterpiece created by artist James McNeill Whistler in 1861-2. The model, Joanna Hiffernan, was also a muse, companion and much more to the US-born artist, who was living between London and Paris when the pair met in 1860. At the time of their meeting, Hiffernan, an Irish-born Londoner, was 21. The artist was 26, smitten by her beauty, and her hair, which was "the most beautiful that you have ever seen!" he wrote. "A red not golden but copper – as Venetian as a dream!"
 
The painting, which he eventually titled Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, was rejected by the Royal Academy and the official Paris Salon, and accepted at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, a home – thanks to Napoleon III – for fine artists rejected elsewhere. It sealed Whistler's fate as a great international artist, and won him huge success in his own time.
 
From its first showing in a London gallery, under the title Woman in White, trading up on the popularity of Wilkie Collins's 1859 novel of that name, it caused a stir, was derided publicly and critically praised. Like the Mona Lisa centuries before her, Woman in White drew fascinated crowds, speculating about who and what she was.
 
Much conjecture focussed on the dress. A robe of such dazzling light-suffused whiteness was surely a garment worn by saints and the Virgin Mary, with further allusions to purity and innocence invoked by the white lily in her hand. But what of the flame-red hair, hanging loose, possibly indicative of her morals? And the wolfskin beneath her feet; with its links to wildness, sexuality, and the "beast" waiting to be unleashed inside her – or maybe those who gazed upon her.
 
Controversy raged around these stereotypes – goddess or "fallen" woman – and what all that whiteness could possibly symbolise: purity, virginity, morality, heaven, goodness, faith, perfection. Whistler was a "ruthlessly ambitious and hard-working artist" who was "determined to make his mark", according to Professor Margaret MacDonald, a co-curator of an exhibition at London's Royal Academy, Whistler's Woman in White, as well as co-author of the accompanying book, who is an expert on Whistler. The book examines the complex, enduring relationship between the artist and Hiffernan, and explores how the sensation around The White Girl, which stood on the threshold of modern art, secured Whistler's place in art history.
 
While relishing the publicity it attracted, the artist stayed out of the debate on its white-on-white theme, famously retorting that it "simply represents a girl dressed in white standing in front of a white curtain" – in line with the "art for art's sake" credo he subscribed to. Yet despite his apparent insouciance, he painted "Jo" – as he affectionately called her – in white at least five times, three in his symphonies series. MacDonald tells BBC Culture that, in her view,  Whistler's choice of a white dress was partly because it "contrasted splendidly with her hair", and the artist was excited by the technical challenge of painting white on white, a challenge the artist Auguste Renoir spoke later of sharing.
 
Whistler and Hiffernan's backgrounds couldn't have been more contrasting. He had a privileged childhood in New England, and grew up surrounded by wealth. Hiffernan came from a poor working-class family from Limerick in Ireland, who arrived penniless in London. She had considerable innate talents; she was (according to Whistler's biographers Elizabeth R Pennell and Joseph Pennell) of "next to no education, but of keen intelligence… [and] great charm of manner". MacDonald says that Jo and her sister Agnes (who were close) were "not quite on the streets… but it was very difficult for somebody with nothing to make a living in London. And they were beautiful, so modelling [for an artist] was certainly one option".
 

It was an option even if that modelling could be seen by "polite society" of her day as a fall from grace. And when Whistler first painted Hiffernan, he used vivid colours, and told his painter friend, Henri Fantin-Latour, she was like a "putain" (prostitute). Although they never married in the legal sense, their relationship would last 20 years – until her death – and she was vitally important to him.  She not only posed for his best portraits – exposing herself in the process to lead white paint that may well have contributed to her death from a lung disease at 44 – she also cared for his son from an affair for many years, and sometimes managed his estate.
 
Her part in his great fame might have mostly gone unsung. But 160 years later, a fascinating spotlight falls on Hiffernan, her personality and their life together, as revealed in the Royal Academy exhibition.
 
MacDonald and her team were thrilled to discover, using X-radiographs, images buried under layers of some of his paintings (which he'd painted over to save on canvas) depicting Hiffernan "her eyes looking devoutly upward, as if to heaven", in the guise of "a woman praying, saint or a nun" as MacDonald puts it. "All possible spiritual interpretations of the model's expression at this stage."
 
"Incandescent beings"
 
White in artworks carries "a wide spectrum of meanings," says Marina Warner, historian, art critic and author of books including Stranger Magic, and Monuments and Maidens. "If it's shining, as it is with the curtain in The White Girl, it brings a sense of being close to light, and ideas of purity and cleanliness," Warner tells BBC Culture However, "shining white is also associated with angels, which are incandescent beings – candidus is Latin for white, and light is the origin of things. If you read Dante's Commedia [later known as The Divine Comedy], as you rise to heaven, it gets brighter and brighter. So that connection of whiteness with goodness is very, very strong."

 
The dress in the painting is "not shiny" she points out "and in this she's less angelic than nubile. Also a strong symbolic meaning of whiteness is a threshold – if you're a candidate or a novice up to become a nun, you wear white, as you do for your first communion; and if you marry you wear white and pass across the threshold of maidenhead into the world of sexuality".
 
Warner notes the model's "red lips, and hair hanging loose, possibly a sign of availability. She looks apt to surrender without much of a struggle. A hint of dangerous sexuality in the wolfskin… even the flowers in the carpet are hinting at fruition or fertility". Indeed, the Woman in White curators believe Whistler's white-clad series may have been inspired by Jean-Baptiste Greuze's painting La Cruche Cassée (1771),"with its depiction of fair young flesh and a silky, disarrayed white dress," as MacDonald's book describes it. But as Warner says, white conveys a wide spectrum of connotations. She, like Courbet before her, finds the figure "rather spectral. I mean, in Victorian psychic photographs, ghosts are white, and there's something insubstantial, phantom-like about her. And of course, in many religions, whiteness is the colour of death".         
 
The painting's success influenced striking works of that time, such as Frederick Sandys' Gentle Spring (1865); Sir John Everett Millais' The Somnambulist (1871); The Woman in White (1871) by Frederick Walker; Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Hermine Gallia (1904); John Singer Sargent's intriguing Fumée d’Ambre Gris (1880);  and arresting portraits by Berthe Morisot, such as her The Artist's Sister at a Window (1869). MacDonald's co-author, Aileen Ribeiro, notes how Morisot "loved to depict these soft, floating, semi-transparent white morning gowns in private, informal, domestic settings". She references The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt (1853), which "announces the sexual relationship between the young man and his mistress by specificity of her bedroom attire, a looser, striped white bodice over a white cotton broderie-anglaise petticoat… White then is an ambiguous colour; it can encompass a variety of meanings, from innocence to the lack of it"

 
Writing on the symbolism of white in relation to fashion, Ribeiro observes: "It was Wittgenstein who said that white is 'that which does away with darkness', and for this reason is often linked to virtue, purity, cleanliness and humility". She lists the white toga virilis of ancient Rome, a symbol of the common good; white worn by monarchs at their coronations to underline their duty to the state and people; white associated with faith and religious rites, such as pilgrims to Mecca. There's the fact Popes have worn white since 1566, as a symbol of purity and sacrifice, and it's worn by priests and priestesses in the Shinto religion in Japan, where white has been an auspicious colour since ancient times.
 
Of course there are countless portrayals of white-clad figures in modern art, from Whistler via Klimt's women in dresses gauzy as butterfly wings, through to Picasso's Woman in White (1923) to the vivid self-portraits by Frida Kahlo. One of Kahlo's paintings in which white plays heavily with colour symbolism is The Two Fridas (1939).  She depicts herself in two guises – one Frida in Western clothes, the other in a formal white dress with traditional Tehuana trimming, her exposed heart bleeding on to its white skirt; it's been suggested the white Frida was the life she wished to have but eluded her (children, and happiness with Diego Rivera, from whom she had recently divorced). Kahlo said the picture expressed her desperation and loneliness. Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) is arguably her best-known work featuring herself: her white dress is like a crucifixion shroud, as a neckpiece of thorns, rather than a crown, pierces her skin.
 
White dresses as a tradition for weddings is not as long-held as we might think – in fact, it was Queen Victoria's choice of a white wedding dress finished in lace (to help the ailing lace industry), that inspired a public fashion for bridal white. Bridal fashion expert, Peta Hunt recently told wedding website hitched.co.uk that we will see "a lot more coloured wedding dresses – pinks, blues, blush" and a return of black wedding dresses "for high glamour and drama". Wearing white has figured as a protest tool for women since the early 1900s, notably the British and US Suffragettes. White is the colour "most associated with suffragists today," writes Erin Blakemore for National Geographic. "Long associated with youth, virginity and moral virtue, white suggested that women could be expected to vote for politicians and policies that would better society."
 
Wearing white, Emmeline Pankhurst strode out as leader of the Women's Social and Political Union, to promote votes for women at public marches, including the biggest demonstration of its time in the UK, in Hyde Park, June 1908. A long white dress, worn with purple (symbolising dignity, self-reverence and self-respect) or green (for hope and new life), became an easy-to-assemble uniform for Suffragists attending political rallies. White garments also stood out starkly against the crowds of men in dark suits – an early prototype of the clever photo op.    
 
Wearing white to highlight gender equality – and as an emblem of female empowerment – is still very much with us. In 2019, Donald Trump faced a sea of suffragette white at his State of the Union address, as female Democratic members of Congress stepped up in pristine white clothes: "We'll honour those who went before us and send a message of solidarity, we're not going back on our hard-earned rights," said Lois Frankel, of the House Democratic Women's Working Group. While Christine Holgate, former Australia Post CEO, wore a white jacket when appearing before a Senate inquiry – part of the Wear White 2 Unite campaign to encourage people to support her call for an end to workplace bullying.
 
If she were still alive today, what would Joanna Hiffernan, the original Woman in White, make of the idea of white worn by women as a political statement? She'd probably snort with laughter, and be right behind it, judging by her wry humour and pragmatism, as revealed in the book. And what if she could walk around the Royal Academy, and witness the more than 70 paintings, etchings and Japanese prints that inspired her great friend, to see that the most eagerly sought-out artworks were of herself? That her talents and contributions to Whistler's oeuvre had at last been appreciated, and that she had finally been given her moment in the sun, would be gratifying indeed.
 
Whistler's Woman in White is at the Royal Academy, London, from 26 February to 22 May 2022.
 
The Woman in White and the meanings hidden in a masterpiece. By  By Beverley D'Silva.
BBC, February 21,  2022

 

“Suffragette white” is proving to be a popular fashion choice for women who want to make a statement. Most recently, former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate donned a white jacket in her appearance before a Senate inquiry into her controversial departure from the organisation.

 
Her sartorial choice formed part of the “Wear White 2 Unite” campaign, which encouraged people to sport the colour in support of Holgate and call for an end to workplace bullying.
 
In doing this, Holgate, like Brittany Higgins last month at the Canberra March4Justice, is building on a trend in which women are wearing white clothing — and often referencing suffrage history — to draw attention to gender inequity today.

 
Deeds not words
 
The term “suffragette” is sometimes mistakenly used to refer to all those who campaigned for women’s voting rights. But it was actually a label applied to a specific group of women — initially in a derogatory sense.
 
The women’s suffrage movement in Britain took off during the 1860s. By the turn of the 20th century, women still did not have the vote.

 
This led Emmeline Pankhurst to establish the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Her group of primarily white women believed militancy was the only way they could achieve change, living by the motto “deeds not words”.
 
The British press mockingly labelled these women “suffragettes”, adding the diminutive suffix “-ette” in an attempt to de-legitimise them. But Pankhurst’s group was not deterred. It reclaimed the term, eliminating the element of ridicule and rebranding it as “a name of highest honour”.
 
 
Her group’s dramatic actions – from disrupting meetings to damaging public property – cemented their place in the history of women’s suffrage.
 
Purity, dignity and hope
 
Early 20th century suffrage campaigns relied heavily on spectacle and pageantry, using striking visual imagery and mass gatherings to garner the attention of the press and the wider public.
 
Many suffrage organisations adopted colours to symbolise their agenda. In Britain, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies used red and white in their banners, later adding green. The WSPU chose white, purple and green: white for purity, purple for dignity and green for hope.
 
Suffragette white was first donned en masse in June 1908 on Women’s Sunday, the first “monster meeting” hosted by the WSPU in London’s Hyde Park. The 30,000 participants were encouraged to wear white, accessorised with touches of purple and green.
 
Ahead of the march, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s newspaper Votes for Women explained:
 
“the effect will be a magnificent moving colour scheme never before seen in London’s streets.”
 
White fabric was relatively affordable, which meant women of different backgrounds could participate. The colour’s association with purity also helped those involved present themselves as respectable, dignified women.

 
Suffragette white became a mainstay of the WSPU’s demonstrations. In 1911, women who had been imprisoned for militancy were among those who marched in white in the Women’s Coronation Procession.
 
The Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein, wearing a white dress, famously headed the Australian contingent.
 
Goldstein later brought the WSPU’s colours to Australia in her campaigns for a parliamentary seat.
 
Two years later in 1913, members of the WSPU wore white in a funeral procession for their colleague Emily Wilding Davison, who died under the hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.
 
American suffragists soon picked up this tactic, influenced by the British suffragettes as well as by the temperance movement’s use of white ribbons.
 
Cities like Washington D.C. witnessed similar scenes of women in white dresses marching through the streets, making striking material for photographers. Contemporary black women — who were excluded from the suffrage movement in many ways — used the colour in their protests against racial violence, too.

 
Feminist solidarity
 
The modern trend towards white has had particular traction in the US.
 
In 2019, Donald Trump faced a sea of suffragette white at his State of the Union address. Last year, Kamala Harris wore a white pantsuit to deliver her remarks as vice president-elect.
 
Closer to home, at the March4Justice rally in Canberra, Brittany Higgins made a surprise appearance in a white outfit, standing in contrast to the funereal black worn by attendees.

 
By wearing white, these women — either consciously or not — are building connections with their feminist forebears across the Anglosphere. At times this can flatten the complex history of women’s suffrage. It is important to remember it was primarily white, middle-class women who led these suffrage movements, often to the exclusion of women of colour and others.
 
In drawing on their feminist genealogy, women today need to acknowledge the limitations of feminisms past and present — and not simply celebrate and reproduce the attitudes of over a hundred years ago.
 
At the same time, wearing suffragette white is a powerful and highly symbolic gesture that reminds us just how long women have been fighting.
 
By establishing a sense of feminist solidarity across time and space, this move can also generate inspiration and energy and attract media attention. Women of colour’s choice to wear white can be read as a way of asserting their place within a movement from which they have historically been (and continue to be) excluded — and honouring women of colour who have come before them.

 
Like the suffragettes of the early 20th century, women today are showing the power of visual spectacle to grab the public’s attention. Whether this will, in turn, lead to real change remains to be seen.
 
What is suffragette white? The colour has a 110-year history as a protest tool. By Michelle Staff. The Conversation, April, 20, 2021.

“A wedding gown represents far more than just a dress. It is also the embodiment of a dream,” said Vera Wang.
 
For most American brides, that dream is realized in a beautiful white wedding gown. It’s a seemingly timeless tradition that is often the center point of little girls’ wedding fantasies. In 2018, about 83% of brides wore white dresses on their big day, according to a survey by Brides Magazine. Such an overwhelming statistic begs the question: Why do we associate white with wedding gowns? And how long has this tradition existed?
 
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, a leading 19th century women’s publication, addressed this in an article on the “Etiquette of Trousseau” in their August 1849 issue. “Custom, from time immemorial, has decided on white as [a wedding gown’s] proper hue, emblematic of the freshness and purity of girlhood,” they wrote.
 
While this implies a long history of bridal white, it is not true. At the time, white had only been a popular wedding dress fashion for about nine years – strictly among the well-to-do.
So when and where did the white wedding dress originate? As a curator at The Ohio State University’s Historic Costumes and Textiles Collection, I have often been asked this question, and my research included the search for an answer.
 
The practice likely traces back more than 2,000 years, with roots in the Roman Republic (509 B.C. - 27 B.C.) when brides wore a white tunic. The color white represented purity, symbolizing both a woman’s chastity and her transition to a married Roman matron. It was also associated with Vesta, the virgin goddess of hearth, home and family who was served by temple priestesses garbed in distinctive white clothing.
 
After the fall of the Roman Empire, white marriage attire fell out of fashion. From the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, most brides simply wore their best dress or purchased a new gown that could be worn again. White was simply not a practical choice in a world without running water – or where laundry was hand-washed.
 
A royal wedding sparked the modern trend in white bridal wear. Queen Victoria chose to forgo the royal tradition of wearing coronation robes when she married Prince Albert on Feb. 10, 1840. Instead, she wore a fashionable white gown that was featured in newspapers and magazines around the world.
 
The style and color of her gown was copied across continents as women aspired to look like the young, attractive queen – much like the public emulates celebrities today. Wearing a white wedding dress became a sign of wealth and status rather than virginity. Only wealthy brides could wear a white silk gown, since they were wed in clean, elegant places that were removed from the muck and grime of life during the mid-19th century Industrial Age.
 
These gowns were actually cream or ivory, which was more flattering to the complexion. The brilliant white wedding dress would not become popular in Europe and North America until the 1930s, and would not truly become rooted in the public consciousness until World War II.
 
With U.S. wartime rations of fabric and a surge of weddings as American soldiers returned from the front, the war sparked changes in the design of wedding dresses. In 1943, while the war was still raging, the federal Limitation Order 85 dictated that only one and three-quarters yards of fabric could be used to create a dress.
 
The American Association of Bridal Manufacturers lobbiedfor an exemption, arguing that it was important to the overall morale of citizens. They asserted, after conducting a study of 2,000 brides that, “American boys are going off to war and what are they fighting for except the privilege of getting married in a traditional way? They’re fighting for our way of life, and this is part of our way of life.”
 
They were ultimately successful, and the limitation order exempted wedding gowns. But silk was difficult to find; the war with Japan had disrupted trade routes. Nylon was also in short supply, as it was being used in place of silk to manufacture parachutes. Most wedding gowns from those years were made from acetate – except for those worn in “parachute weddings.” Some soldiers, like B-29 pilot Major Claude Hensinger, kept the parachutes that saved their lives during the war and later gave the material to their betrothed to make a gown.
 
Although the first records of brides garbed in white reach far back into the annals of history, it only became standard fashion over last 80 years. With the arrival of ready-to-wear clothing, brides could order affordable, mass-produced gowns based on sample sizes that were then fitted for them: a custom-made gown at a ready-to-wear price. A large, traditional wedding with the bride outfitted in a princess-style white wedding gown became a symbol of the American dream.
 
From WWII through the end of the 20th century, the white gown symbolized prosperity, virginity and a lifetime commitment to one person. For most people today, those meanings are gone.
 
White is now the overwhelming choice for most American brides, with 4 out of 5 choosing to walk down the aisle in a white gown, a sort of bridal uniform. It has become an iconic symbol of weddings, an expected part of the celebration, and despite knowing the relatively short history of the tradition of a white wedding, it was my choice as well.
 
Why do brides wear white? By Marlise Schoeny. The Conversation, September 4, 2020. 

I imagine Meghan Markle standing before her dress the night before her wedding, considering. Instead of a white column of lace or a dramatic froth of translucent charmeuse, she touches the sleeve of a russet red gown, trimmed with mink and gold-embroidered, the skirt heavy with heirloom jewels. This is the dress she'll wear down the aisle.

 While this seems like a shocking pick today, prior to the 20th century this would have been the norm for wealthy European brides. Pristine, white, fairy-tale wedding dresses, to be worn once and then tucked away, weren't the standard until relatively recently. Before then, colored dresses were the norm for brides of all classes.

 While a few historic women wore white gowns to the altar over the centuries -- including Mary Queen of Scots in 1558 -- it wasn't until Queen Victoria debuted a white silk-spun gown at her wedding to Prince Albert in 1840 that the look really took root. Side-stepping the usual fur, gold embroidery, and rich colors that were the norm among the aristocracy at the time, Victoria stepped out of her carriage wearing a simple white dress accented with Honiton lace, and traded her crown for a wreath of orange blossoms and myrtle.

 However, when the wedding march began and the guests turned around, they found it all very underwhelming -- where was the pomp and circumstance? Royal weddings were more about wealth and political contracts than love, so families typically took the opportunity to express their affluence through their brides: Margaret of York's wedding dress from 1468 was reportedly so heavy with heirloom jewels that she had to be carried into the church; Princess Charlotte, in 1816, wore a silver lamé gown embroidered with shells and flowers, which was said to have cost £10,000 (the equivalent of about $1.3 million, adjusting for inflation). By showing up in a simple white dress, it seemed that Victoria was throwing a frugal affair.

 That was partly the point. A young Lady Regent at 20, Queen Victoria wanted to show good sense and prudence on her wedding to show her people that she would run their country much in the same way.

 But why white? The reason is layered. Knowing that her dress would be reported on around the world, Queen Victoria chose to wear a dress trimmed with handmade Honiton lace from the small village of Beer, to support the declining lace trade and give the industry a boon. White, she reasoned, was the best way to show off the lace makers' artistry.

 That's not to say that her marriage to Prince Albert was purely a show of duty: there were just as many romantic elements involved. Part of the reason Queen Victoria eschewed the heirloom jewels, heavy fabrics and rich colors was that she didn't want to make her vows to her husband as a monarch, but rather as the woman he loved.

 As predicted, her dress was reported on for months on end. News of this charmingly simple frock spread far and wide, reaching across the Atlantic to the colonies, and was syndicated in just about every newspaper column and women's magazine for months on over. In 1849, Godey's Lady's Book, the Vogue of the Victorian world, decreed: "Custom has decided, from the earliest ages, that white is the most fitting hue, whatever may be the material. It is an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one."

 However, the white dress didn't initially catch on because it symbolized an unsullied heart. It caught on because it looked like money. At the time, most women exchanged vows in dresses they already owned, and there was only one group of people who could afford to own anything white: the leisure class. There weren't dry cleaners and laundromats around in the late 19th-century, so it took money to maintain a white outfit.

 Buying a white dress was seen as extremely impractical, especially when one considered the festivities of a wedding. Between the drinking, the dancing, and the scooping of desserts, chances were the frock would be ruined and only be worn once. No working-class woman would be able to afford that kind of frivolousness.

 In 1873, Mary Sheehan Ronan, a 20-year old American bride, wrote in her journal: "I had dreams of a white dress with a train, a bridal veil, and wreath of orange blossoms, but when the time actually came I considered conventional things inharmonious with the simplicity and unconventionality of our way of living." Instead, she wore a pearl gray dress, one of the two she and her stepmother had recently made.

 But that was the norm for brides who didn't come from money. In 1911, when a newly engaged woman wrote into Washington's Tacoma Times newspaper seeking a recommendation for a "plain wedding dress," the columnist recommended buying a frock in white wool, which could easily be dyed for another occasion. But, she asked, "Why not be married in your traveling suit?" Perhaps it seemed a touch too extravagant to buy a new dress for the occasion.

 It took until after World War II for the middle-class to begin copying the look of the wealthy, thanks to the boon in prosperity after the war. With rations gone, it became a novel idea to buy a dress just to celebrate in for a day, and when Hollywood began marching brides in white across theater screens, the quaint, chapel-like look became part of the tradition.

 That's not to say that brides have only been wearing white since. Brigitte Bardot wore a pink gingham dress, complete with lace-trimmed sleeves and a tea-length skirt, in 1959, and Elizabeth Taylor only wore white to two of her eight weddings. More recently, Keira Knightley wore a pale gray Chanel dress for her 2013 nuptials, Sarah Jessica Parker wore a black ballgown in 1997, and Julianne Moore wore lavender Prada in 2003.

 Even today, many different cultures wear different colors. In China and India, for example, red dresses are worn as a symbol of good luck and success. Traditional Nigerian brides veer towards brightly colored, elaborately accessorized dresses, and wedding dresses in Ghana vary from couple to couple, with each family uses its own intricate cloth pattern. Traditional Hungarian dresses are white with colorful floral patterns embroidered down their lengths, and Malaysian gowns usually come in purple or violet.

 Sartorially, Meghan Markle has proven herself an nontraditional future-royal, wearing her hair in messy buns (Kate Middleton prefers hair nets), and choosing cross-body bags over dainty clutches so her arms free to hug and shake hands. And although she will almost certainly keep with tradition and don a white dress on wedding day, she will walk down the aisle representing the same refreshing and unexpected spirit the white dress embodied when Queen Victoria first popularized it 179 years ago.

 She's a woman that knows her own mind, and isn't afraid to side-step protocol to start her own traditions. And history will remember her for it.

 

Why so many brides wear white on their wedding day. By Marlen Komar. CNN, February 8, 2019

Sun stare, don't care with my head in my hands thinking of a simpler time
Like Sun Ra, feel small, but I had it under control every time
 
When I was a waitress wearing a white dress
Look how I do this, look how I got this
I was a waitress working the night shift
You were my man, felt like I got this
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
Down in Orlando, I was only 19
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
I only mention it 'cause it was such a scene
And I felt seen
Mmh, mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh, mhm
 
Summer, sizzling
Listening to jazz out on the lawn
Listening to White Stripes when they were white-hot
Listening to rock, all day long
 
When I was a waitress wearing a tight dress, handling the heat
I wasn't famous, just listening to Kings of Leon to the beat
Like, look at how I got this
Look how I got this, just singing in the street
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
I felt free 'cause I was only 19
Such a scene
 
Summer, summer's almost gone
We were talking about life, we were sitting outside 'til dawn
But I would still go back
If I could do it all again, I'd fly
Because it made me feel, made me feel like a god
'Cause it made me feel, made me feel like a god
Somehow it made me feel, made me feel like a god
 
When I was a waitress wearing a white dress
Look how I do this, look how I got this
I was a waitress working the night shift
You were my man, felt like I got this
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
Down in Orlando, I was only 19
Down at the Men in Music Business Conference
I only mention it 'cause it was such a scene
And I felt seen
Mmh, mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh, mhm
 
When I was a waitress wearing a tight dress
Like, look how I do it, look how I got this
I was a waitress wearing a tight dress
Like, look who would do this, look who would got this
 
It made me feel, made me feel like a god
It kinda makes me feel, like maybe I was better off
'Cause it made me feel, made me feel like a god
Kinda makes me feel like maybe I was better off
 
 
 
Lana del Rey   /  The White Dress

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