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 

Diotima / Aspasia : Socrates and a Hetaira

Where did Socrates, the foundational figure of Western philosophy, get the inspiration for his original ideas about truth, love, justice, courage and knowledge? New research I’ve conducted reveals that as a young man in 5th-century BC Athens, he came into contact with a fiercely intelligent woman, Aspasia of Miletus. I argue that her ideas about love and transcendence inspired him to formulate key aspects of his thought (as transmitted by Plato).

If the evidence for this thesis is accepted, the history of philosophy will have taken a momentous turn: a woman who has been all but erased from the story must be acknowledged as laying the foundations of our 2,500-year old philosophical tradition.

A neoclassical painting by the 19th-century artist Nicolas Monsiau depicts Socrates sitting across a table from a lusciously dressed, gesticulating Aspasia. The handsome young soldier Alcibiades looks on. The image captures the standard view of Socrates: as poor and ugly. The son of a stonemason, he was known from middle age for going unshod and wearing ragged clothes.

But Socrates is also said by Plato to have been instructed in eloquence by Aspasia, who for more than a decade was the partner of Athens’s leading statesman Pericles. Supposedly a highly educated “courtesan”, Aspasia is shown in the painting enumerating the points of a speech on her fingers. Her gaze is directed at the aristocratic youth Alcibiades, who was Pericles’ ward and probably Aspasia’s great-nephew. Socrates claimed to be enthralled by Alcibiades’ good looks and charisma, and (as recounted in Plato’s dialogue Symposium) he saved his life at the Battle of Potidaea in 432 BC.

Does the painting do Socrates justice? His main biographers, Plato and Xenophon, knew him only as an older man. But Socrates was once young, and was a direct contemporary of Aspasia’s. And, from surviving images of the philosopher, occasional information given by his biographers, and ancient written texts which have been generally overlooked or misinterpreted, a different picture of Socrates emerges: that of a well-educated youth who grew up to be no less brave a soldier than Alcibiades, and a passionate lover of both sexes no less than a intense thinker and debater.

Socrates was famous for saying: “The only thing I know is that I don’t know.” But Plato, in Symposium (199b), reports him as saying that he learned “the truth about love” from a clever woman. That woman is given the name “Diotima” – and in Symposium Socrates expounds her doctrine.

Scholars have almost universally dismissed Diotima as a fiction. She is described in the dialogue as a priestess or seer (mantis), and she is thought at best to be an allegorical figure – one of inspired or visionary wisdom who might have initiated a thinker such as Socrates into the mysteries of Love. But Plato leaves some curiously precise clues about the identity of Diotima which have never hitherto been elucidated. In my book I present the evidence to show that “Diotima” is in fact a thinly-veiled disguise for Aspasia.

Aspasia came from a high-born Athenian family, related to that of Pericles, which had settled in the Greek city of Miletus in Ionia (Asia Minor) some decades earlier. When she migrated to Athens around 450 BC she was around the age of 20. At that date Socrates too was around 20 years old.

A few years later, Aspasia became attached to Pericles, who was then a leading politician in Athens – and already twice her age. But a pupil of Aristotle, Clearchus, records that “before Aspasia became Pericles’ companion, she was with Socrates”. This fits with other evidence that Socrates was part of Pericles’s circle as a young man. He would undoubtedly have become acquainted with Aspasia in that milieu.

Given that he was part of this privileged elite in his youth, what impelled Socrates to turn to the life of the mind, shun material success and reorient philosophical thinking for posterity? No one has ever sought to trace the trajectory of the younger Socrates, because the biographical sources are scattered and fragmentary, and appear to say little of interest regarding his thought. But since Socrates was well known in Athens as a philosopher by his thirties, the earlier period is where we should seek evidence of his change of direction to becoming the thinker he was to be. I argue that Socrates’ acquaintance with Aspasia provides the missing link.

Aspasia was the cleverest and most influential woman of her day. The partner of Pericles for around 15 years, she was widely slandered and reviled by the comic playwrights - the tabloid journalists of their day - for her influence over him. Part of Pericles’s circle of thinkers, artists and politicians, she is depicted by Plato, Xenophon and others as an admired instructor of eloquence, as well as a matchmaker and marriage counsellor.

In Plato’s dialogue Menexenus she is described as teaching Socrates how to give a funeral speech – just as she had allegedly once taught Pericles. She was, in other words, known for her skill in speaking and, like “Diotima”, in particular for speaking about love.

So. Could Socrates and Aspasia have fallen in love when they first met and conversed in their twenties? The fact that Plato accords Aspasia considerable intellectual authority over Socrates has alarmed generations of scholars, who have largely dismissed the scenario in Menexenus as a parody of oratorical techniques.

Meanwhile, they have been happy to consider Aspasia a “brothel-keeper and prostitute” on the strength of citations from comic poets of the day. At best, scholars have elevated Aspasia to the status of hetaira – a courtesan. But this appellation is not once given to her in ancient sources.

If we accept the evidence that Aspasia was, like “Diotima”, an authoritative instructor of eloquence and an expert on matters of love – rather than a common prostitute or even an influential courtesan – a striking possibility arises. The notions attributed in Symposium to “Diotima” are central to the philosophy as well as to the way of life that Socrates was to espouse.

The doctrine put in the mouth of “Diotima” teaches that the physical realm can and should be put aside in favour of higher ideals; that the education of the soul, not the gratification of the body, is love’s paramount duty; and that the particular should be subordinated to the general, the transient to the permanent, and the worldly to the ideal.

These ideas may be acknowledged as lying at the very root of the Western philosophical tradition. If so, identifying the fictional “Diotima” as the real Aspasia makes for a historically sensational conclusion. In retrospect, the identification is so obvious that its failure to be seen clearly up to now must perhaps be attributed to conscious or unconscious prejudices about the status and intellectual capacities of women.

The time is ripe to restore the beautiful, dynamic and clever Aspasia to her true status as one of the founders of European philosophy.

Socrates in love: how the ideas of this woman are at the root of Western philosophy. By Armand D’Angour. The Conversation,  March 6, 2019. 

Using ancient written sources that have been generally overlooked or misinterpreted, I recover a lost picture of Socrates as a young man in his teens and 20s. Since he was already known as a philosopher in his 30s, this earlier period is where we need to look for evidence of his change of direction to becoming the thinker he was to be. My new interpretation of the evidence firmly identifies Socrates’ alleged instructor ‘Diotima’ in Plato’s Symposium with Aspasia of Miletus, the brilliant partner of Athens’ dominant political figure, Pericles. I conclude that important elements of Socrates’ thinking resulted from his acquaintance with and admiration of Aspasia, who was close in age to him, when he was in his 20s.

If Socrates changed direction, what was his direction before? As a boy he was a pupil in dance and music of the famous teacher Lampros, who had also taught Sophocles (who was 25 years older than Socrates). As a teenager he studied the ideas of earlier (‘Presocratic’) thinkers such as Anaxagoras, who was close to Pericles; and he became the intimate protégé of another important thinker, Archelaus. Socrates grew up, therefore, in an upper-class milieu, in which young Athenian men valued intellectual and musical achievements as well as physical prowess and courage on the battlefield.

This picture will surprise those who imagine that Socrates was poor and of lowly background. In later life his appearance was notably unrefined, and he went around barefoot and in ragged garments; but he is made to say (in Plato’s Apology) that he chose poverty in order to pursue his calling. The earliest visual description of Socrates is in Aristophanes’ play Clouds of 423 BC, when he was 46. There he is depicted not as ugly or paunchy — by his own admission he put on weight after his fighting days were over in his 50s — but as one of a group of pale, scrawny, and long-haired thinkers.

The fact that Socrates is  portrayed by Plato and Xenophon as a man of high education, knowledge, and intellectual authority compels the conclusion that he was well schooled from youth, and not the uneducated child of an impecunious father. A regular fighter in Athens’ battles until his late 40s, he must also have possessed the wealth qualification and expensive panoply (suit of armour), as well as the courage, physique, and fitness, to be a hoplite soldier (heavy-armed infantryman) from the age of 20, when Athenian hoplites were first deployed on the battlefield.

Socrates’ father Sophroniscus was a stonemason, but that may mean a well-off artisan, perhaps even the owner of a workshop with numerous slaves, at a time when Athens was commissioning a huge number of stone monuments after the Persian Wars. Sophroniscus had high-class connections in his native village: his closest friend there was known to be Lysimachus, son of the war-hero Aristides and a man of impeccably elite status. Socrates’ first marriage was to Lysimachus’s daughter Myrto, with whom he had his two older sons. This marriage will have taken place long before he encountered his later companion, the famously demanding Xanthippe, in his 50s.

Young Socrates grew up, then, among young men trained in poetry, music, oratory, philosophy, dancing, wrestling, and fighting. He too would have wanted to compete and excel in those spheres. What impelled him to turn to the life of the mind, shun material success, and reorient philosophical thinking for posterity?

The facts recounted above about Socrates’ life are readily available to historians, even if their cumulative implications have not been given due weight. What has hitherto gone unrecognized is that, when Socrates says in Plato’s Symposium that “long ago [i.e. as a young man] I learned all about love from a clever woman”, we are being told a biographical truth. The woman is given the name ‘Diotima’, and she has long been supposed a fictional character. But renewed scrutiny of the text of Symposium and of relevant historical evidence points to ‘Diotima’ being Plato’s disguise for a real woman: Aspasia of Miletus.

The partner of Athens’ leading citizen Pericles for more than a decade, Aspasia was the cleverest, best known, most influential, and most reviled woman of her day. Part of Pericles’ circle of thinkers, artists, and politicians, she was known as being an expert instructor of eloquence and a sought-after adviser on marital relationships; in other words, someone who was known for presenting a doctrine about Love, just as Diotima is portrayed in Symposium. In another of Plato’s dialogues, Menexenus, Aspasia herself is described training Socrates to give a speech.

This clever woman must have been a key intellectual influence in Socrates’ early life, and she didn’t teach him just about public speaking, or only about the meaning of love:

The notions attributed in Symposium to ‘Diotima’ are central to the philosophy as well as to the way of life that Socrates was to espouse:  that the physical realm can and should be put aside in favour of higher ideals; that the education of the soul, not the gratification of the body, is love’s paramount duty; that we need to define our terms before we can hope to know what they entail in practice; and that the particular should be subordinated to the general, the transient to the permanent, and the worldly to the ideal. Her thinking, no less than what Socrates and his successors were to make of it, should therefore be acknowledged as lying at the very root of the Western philosophical tradition.

Unravelling the identity of ‘Diotima’ makes for a historically momentous conclusion. In retrospect, however, the identification is so obvious that its failure to be seen clearly up to now can only be attributed to conscious or unconscious prejudices about the status and intellectual capacities of women throughout the ages. The time has come to restore Aspasia to her true status as the woman who, through her contribution to Socrates’ thought and therefore that of his successors, may now be recognised as key to the two-millennia old legacy of Western philosophy.

Socrates in Love. By Armand D’Angour.   Website Armand D’Angour

Bloomsbury

The "ladder of love" is a metaphor that occurs in Plato’s Symposium. Socrates, making a speech in praise of Eros, recounts the teachings of a priestess, Diotima.   The “ladder” represents the ascent a lover might make from purely physical attraction to a beautiful body, the lowest rung, to contemplation of the Form of Beauty itself.

Diotima spells out the stages in this ascent in terms of what sort of beautiful thing the lover desires and is drawn toward.

1.       A particular beautiful body.  This is the starting point, when love, which by definition is a desire for something we don’t have, is first aroused by the sight of individual beauty.

2.      All beautiful bodies.  According to standard Platonic doctrine, all beautiful bodies share something in common, something the lover eventually comes to recognize. When he does recognize this, he moves beyond a passion for any particular body.

3.   Beautiful souls.  Next, the lover comes to realize that spiritual and moral beauty matters much more than physical beauty.  So he will now yearn for the sort of interaction with noble characters that will help him become a better person.

4.  Beautiful laws and institutions. These are created by good people (beautiful souls) and are the conditions which foster moral beauty.

5.   The beauty of knowledge.  The lover turns his attention to all kinds of knowledge, but particularly, in the end to philosophical understanding.  (Although the reason for this turn isn’t stated, it is presumably because philosophical wisdom is what underpins good laws and institutions.)

6.  Beauty itself–that is, the Form of the Beautiful.  This is described as “an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades.” It is the very essence of beauty, “subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness.”  And every particular beautiful thing is beautiful because of its connection to this Form.   The lover who has ascended the ladder apprehends the Form of Beauty in a kind of vision or revelation, not through words or in the way that other sorts of more ordinary knowledge are known.

Diotima tells Socrates that if he ever reached the highest rung on the ladder and contemplated the Form of Beauty, he would never again be seduced by the physical attractions of beautiful youths.  Nothing could make life more worth living than enjoying this sort of vision.  Because the Form of Beauty is perfect, it will inspire perfect virtue in those who contemplate it.

This account of the ladder of love is the source for the familiar notion of “Platonic love,” by which is meant the sort of love that is not expressed through sexual relations.  The description of the ascent can be viewed as an account of sublimation, the process of transforming one sort of impulse into another, usually, one that is viewed as “higher” or more valuable.  In this instance, sexual desire for a beautiful body becomes sublimated into a desire for philosophical understanding and insight.

Plato's "Ladder of Love". By  Emrys Westacott.  Thoughtco , April 11, 2018

When the Athenian politician Pericles delivered his famous Funeral Oration at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), commemorating those who had fallen during the course of the year, a rumour emerged that his companion, Aspasia was the real author. The claim was made by no other than Socrates, whose testimony was recorded by Plato. This assertion may not be that difficult to believe in view of Aspasia’s role in Athenian society.

Aspasia (c. 460-400 BC) was a hetaira, an elite companion or courtesan trained in the arts of pleasing wealthy, upper-class men. This training included acquiring musical skills, developing the art of conversation and, of course, being able to sexually satisfy clients.

While Aspasia may not have been a typical hetaira, but rather an exceptionally successful and fortunate one, there is ancient evidence to attest that this class of women was educated in literary arts, philosophy, and rhetoric. In this sense, they could converse with men in a way that traditional wives could not, owing to the limited access to formal education afforded Athenian girls and women of citizen families.

Yet Aspasia may not have born into the trade. From a wealthy family from Miletus (in modern-day Turkey), she seems to have acquired her extensive education through virtue of their prominence and her father’s decision to allow her tuition. The circumstances behind her arrival in Athens are debated, although as a resident alien, Aspasia had little options once there. She could not legally marry an Athenian citizen, nor could she seek legitimate work.

Other hetairai, like Neaira, were put into the trade as children and trained for a life of satisfying wealthy clients. There are comparatively extensive records for Neaira, who lived in Athens in the 4th century BC, owing to her involvement in a court case on charges of illegally marrying and passing off her daughter as a legitimate Athenian. Through the course of the proceedings, Neaira’s life was detailed, and it tells a very different tale to the comparatively glamorous accounts of Aspasia’s time with Pericles.

As a little girl, Neaira was sold to a woman by the name of Nicarete and trained as a sex worker in her brothel in Corinth (in southern Greece). Accounts of her life as a child reveal that she was working for Nicarete, along with six other girls purchased at the same time, before she had come of age (before puberty). As she matured, Neaira was sold, passed around, and finally found herself in court on charges of illegally marrying.

The lives of other girls and women reveal the hardships they faced. In addition to hetairai, there were those who worked their whole lives (until they were of no further use) in brothels. The price of women varied according to their age and condition and the quality (or lack thereof) of the business. As the hetairai were trained in the skills required to please men, women in brothels were sometimes modified to suit certain male tastes.

In an extract preserved from a comic play from the 4th or 3rd century BC, the lengths to which a pimp would go to alter the appearance and behaviour of new girls is recorded:

          One girl happens to be small? Cork is stitched to the sole of her

 delicate shoes. One girl happens to be tall? She wears a flat slipper,

 and goes out drooping her head on her shoulders, thus

 taking away some of her height. One girl doesn’t have hips?

 She puts on a girdle with padded hips under her clothes so that

 men, on seeing her beautiful derriere, call out to her.

Comedies, which regularly dealt with what society deemed as the less salubrious aspects of life, have provided historians of sex with significant evidence of brothel life. The passage continues:

          One girl has red eyebrows? They paint them with lamp soot.

One girl happens to be black? She anoints herself with white lead. One girl is too white-skinned? She smears on rouge. One part of her body is beautiful? She shows it naked. Her teeth are pretty? She must, of necessity, smile so that the men present may see what an elegant mouth she has. But if she does not enjoy smiling, she must spend the day indoors and, like something positioned by a butcher when selling goats’ heads, she must hold upright between her teeth a thin stick of myrtle; that way, in time she will show off her teeth whether she likes to or not.
thin, fat, round, tall, short,
youthful, antique, middle-aged, or overly ripe …

In another comedy from the same era, the playwright describes the women on display in brothels. They are depicted as “sun-bathing” with their “breasts openly displayed” and “naked for action and lined up in rows.” As with the modification of the women described above, this passage also discusses the variety of women available:

     From them you may select one for your pleasure: thin, fat, round, tall, short,

youthful, antique, middle-aged, or overly ripe …

The passage also includes a statement that explains the popularity of paying for sex in ancient Greece; namely the safety-net it afforded men who could not even look at freeborn women for fear of reprisals.

As a woman aged, the chances of being able to access a means living through sex work became decidedly more difficult. Turning to a comic play once more, there is a description of an aged hetaira called Lais and the difficulties and humiliations facing her, which is evoked by the lines: “it is easier to get an audience with her than it is to spit”.

Lais was an actual person who lived around the same time as Aspasia, and was reputed to have been a stunningly beautiful hetaira. Once courted by elite men, and described as having a haughty disposition, the aged Lais is depicted in this comedic passage as roaming the streets, taking on any client she could get, and having become “so tame … that she takes the money out of your hand.”

The existence of so-called “temple prostitution” in Greek, Italian and Near Eastern antiquity has been recorded by several ancient authors, including Strabo in his Geography, written in the first century BC, which details “temple slaves” in the precincts of Aphrodite at Eryx (Sicily) and Corinth. Some sources, including Strabo, imply that the women were dedicated as votive offerings to the goddess, and that they serviced clients as a form of “sacred sex.”

Nevertheless, some scholars now question the practice, offering several alternative explanations, including the possibility of brothels having been associated with such temples but not strictly related to them, and the confusion over accounts of women donating to temples of those goddesses under whose divine ordinance they practised their work.

In addition to hetairai, lower-grade sex workers who populated brothels from the slave and resident alien classes and possibly, temple slaves, there were also young men who serviced clients. Like their female equivalents, young men worked in the ergasterion (workshop) and the porneion (brothel) at the bottom end of the market, which were were dismal environments for the porne (harlot) and pornos (rent-boy) alike.

The word hetairos (male companion) is also attested in some sources but rarely in its reference to sexual activity. As with females, youthful men were the most desired, with a preference for those between the ages of 12 to 17. These young men also worked alongside the women often referred to as “flute girls” at the male gatherings called symposia. At these social events, young sex workers would entertain the guests, serve them food and wine, and if required, service them.

Outliving Pericles by almost 30 years, Aspasia was said to have become the companion of another politician, Lysicles. She was a survivor and experienced an exceptionally long life as a hetaira. As such, she was a rarity.

Elite companions, flute girls and child slaves: sex work in ancient Athens. By  Marguerite Johnson. The Conversation  , December 20, 2017.