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 Rationality of the World: A Philosophical Reading of the Book of Job

I am a philosopher who believes that Western philosophy begins not with Plato, but elsewhere, and earlier, with the Book of Job. That is because I believe that the problem of evil is the central point where philosophy begins, and threatens to stop. The experience of inexplicable suffering and basest injustice forces us to ask whether our lives have meaning, or whether human existence may be deeply incomprehensible. And if that is the case, then the urge to philosophy can seem to be a simple mistake.

Put more optimistically: if the task of philosophy is to show how the world is, or can be made rational, then it must address the presence of evil in the world.

Consider the classic statement of the problem of evil. It consists of three sentences which are impossible to maintain together:

God exists, and is omnipotent;

God exists, and is benevolent;

Evil exists.

Classically, the majority of thinkers dealt with the problem by denying the third claim. Evil doesn't exist, or anyway not really: you can't have light without having shadows; you wouldn't want to eat sugar all the time and nothing salty (these are Leibniz's examples.) Everything we take to be evil actually happens for the best, and if we knew all that God knows we would understand that too.

Though one still does hear versions of this view from surprising corners, it is the route we are least likely to take these days, largely since the mid-eighteenth century, certainly since the twentieth century. For it denies what we witness nearly every day: children are murdered in Syria or Florida, and the world keeps on turning, and not even the punishment of those responsible ― if it happens at all ― can make a dent in the cosmic flaw that is revealed when that kind of evil shows itself among us.

Before the eighteenth century, however, nearly every major thinker preferred to deny the evidence of his senses than deny the central theses of monotheism ― that God exists, and is omnipotent and benevolent. Perhaps it would have seemed a denial of hope. The Book of Job is matchless because it is unwilling to make the problem easier by dropping any of these claims, and makes us feel the force of all of them.

Note that the example I just used is an example of moral evil, which is different to what, up to the mid-eighteenth century, was called natural evil ― namely, the suffering that is caused through things like earthquakes, plagues and floods. One revolutionary turn of the Enlightenment was to make a radical distinction between these: there is a fundamental difference between what happens when a child is killed by a vigilante thug and when he is killed by an earthquake in Italy.

I am simply here pointing out that the distinction between natural and moral evils is not a distinction that is important for most traditional believers, and hence not for Job. The book notes no difference in the misery he feels when the suffering was caused by lightning or by marauding neighbours ― after all, both the lightning and the neighbours are all ultimately in the hands of God. So this book ignores a quintessentially modern distinction, but before you conclude that this makes the book less timeless, you should know that Sigmund Freud ― that profound atheist and demystifier ― held the distinction to be of little importance. From the perspective of the one who suffers, the source of the suffering ― earthquakes or vigilantes ― makes very little difference at all.

I want to begin by touching on an unresolved textual question about the Book of Job that I find most interesting: whether the text we know as the Book of Job is the product of more than one author. There is good reason, at first glance, to believe this. Even the best translations cannot obscure the incredible differences in language: the poetry of the main body of the text ― Job's outrage, and God's answer ― seems worlds away from the language of the prologue and epilogue, which is not only prosaic, but so wooden as to come closest to soap opera or slapstick.

Just consider the way in which Job's suffering is introduced: the first messenger appears with the announcement, "The oxen were ploughing and the donkeys grazing and the Sabeans attacked and took them and killed the servants and only I escaped to tell you." Before he had finished speaking another one came and said, "Lightning fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and servants and only I escaped to tell you." Before he had finished speaking, another one came and said, "Your sons and daughters were feasting and a great wind came out of the desert and they're dead and only I escaped to tell you." If you saw this on a stage, you might laugh, or sneer. You can do neither in the main body of the text.

Moreover, the weakness of the language of the prologue and epilogue seems to reflect the weakness of their content. The opening premise is clearly outrageous: God makes a bet with the devil? God allows someone He Himself describes as a man of perfect integrity to be tortured as a means of proving a boast about His own power? And speaking of power, in the second round of torments, the Almighty behaves like a sulky child, complaining to Satan that "You made me torture him for no reason". This is the God who speaks out of the whirlwind with a force and majesty unequalled in the Bible?

If the prologue can seem outrageous (one writer calls it the most brutal scene in all of Western literature) the epilogue can seem ridiculous. It looks like a tacked-on happy ending, straight out of Disney, which simply ignores all the questions that the rest of the book poses. Is there incomprehensible suffering in the world? Of course not, or not for long: at the end of the book Job has 14,000 sheep instead of 7,000, 6,000 camels instead of 3,000; the Lord doubles Job's possessions, and gives him just the same number of children he had before.

Moreover ― and this is perhaps the most crucial point ― the Job of the prologue and the epilogue seem to be a wholly different man from the one we see in the poem. There his rage and rebellion know no bounds; in the prologue and epilogue we only see the Job whose humble piety became proverbial, the man whose only response to the complete destruction of life as he knew it ― and all ten of his children ― was to utter the sentence: "The Lord gave, and the Lord took; blessed be the name of the Lord."

The sense that there are two Jobs in this book, as well as two Gods, has led many to conclude that there must have been two authors. In particular ― since this was one of the books of the Bible whose canonisation was hotly debated, for reasons I think obvious ― scholars have speculated that the epilogue was tacked on at the end in order to support conventional notions of religion and morality that are threatened by the body of the text. (How to do this with the prologue is rather harder to see.) So in order to make the book bearable the second author stuck on a little fairy tale: See folks? God is always just and comprehensible; be good and pious and eventually you'll be rewarded. If you happen to suffer along the way, just hang on and your reward will eventually double.

I am in no position to answer such textual questions, or evaluate the attempts made to argue for the unity of the text. I raise them just to say that scholars are still debating them, and if your initial reaction in reading Job was a sense of severe dissonance between parts of the book, you are not alone.

What we can say, however, that the text has been transmitted to us as a unity. Interpretations of Job have been given to us, usually, as interpretations of the book as a whole ― coherent or not.

Perhaps the most striking fact about traditional, pre-twentieth century literature on Job is just this: Job has preoccupied people for centuries, but what interests us about Job is not what interested them ― anyway, not explicitly. We are moved by this book because we accept, or begin by accepting, its basic premises. We take the text at face value because something about it seems true. Here is a good man who suffers the most horrible series of catastrophes, for no reason at all. Though he tries to bear them with humility and fortitude, he breaks down in a rage that we share: where is justice, and meaning in the world, when this sort of thing is possible?

A brief survey of the immense literature on Job reveals that Job's world is much closer to ours than the world of the intervening centuries; for every earlier interpretation sought to deny some piece of that picture we find undeniable. Some medieval Christian interpretations did this in the most straightforward of ways: they simply censored those pieces of the text in which Job expresses rage. If you leave those out, you get the figure of the patient Job, who remains humble and pious throughout every twist of fate; you get some bits of traditional theodicy about the mysteriousness of God's purposes for the feeble human mind; and Job's piety is rewarded in the end, serving nicely as an example for schoolchildren.

This is precisely what John Calvin did ― admittedly, I haven't read all 159 sermons that he wrote on Job, but in the sample I have taken he goes on to add that Job was actually fortunate to have his riches taken away, given how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, before rushing to add that the story also tells us that riches per se should not be despised. Hello, Max Weber! In sum, the lesson Calvin draws is that Job shows we should be patient until God discloses His reasons, for God can dispose of His creatures at His pleasure. Calvin doesn't mention the children.

Other Christian readings viewed the problems in the Book of Job to be problems within Judaism, which Christianity had resolved. Job was seen as a parallel or precursor to Jesus; one theologian wrote that Job is the question, and Jesus the answer. Moreover, some Christian theologians continued, the difficulties in Job stem from the failure of traditional Judaism to develop an adequate theory of the afterlife. On some views, that theory just is an answer to the problem of evil: the Jobs of the world land in heaven, where the infinite duration of their reward makes any problems they had in the world below seem fleeting and trivial.

Other writers, both Christian and Jewish, suggest that this begs the question: the Book of Job concerns the problem of evil in this world, not in the world to come. But traditional Jewish interpretations can deny the immensity of the problem just as surely as do Christian ones. Here we find no straightforward censorship; once a text has been canonised, it cannot be cut. As a text, it is sacred. If passages in it seem problematic, it is precisely the business of scholarship to explain them, by argument and analogy, by imagining details that were left out of the original text and make it explicable.

In short: Jews don't cut texts, we write more of them. One Midrash (a collection of sacred tales meant to explain problematic passages of Scripture) tells us that Job was punished for the sin of neutrality. Three non-Jews were asked what should be the fate of the children of Israel in Egypt. The father-in-law of Moses, Jethro, said they should be liberated, and he was rewarded appropriately. Pharaoh said they should be annihilated, and we know what happened to him. Job remained silent, undecided, neutral on a question of good and evil; hence the very peculiar nature of his torment.

Another Midrash tells us the following: as the children of Israel were trying to cross the Red Sea, Satan came along to try to stop them. In order to divert Satan long enough for the people to cross, God threw him Job, just as a shepherd may temporarily leave the strongest of his rams to battle the wolf while herding the lambs to safety.

Let's reflect the philosophical structure of these tales. In the first, what is claimed is that Job was guilty of something after all; therefore his punishment was deserved. (Indeed, a host of traditional interpretations accuse Job of a variety of sins, from self-righteousness to rebellion itself. Since God, knowing everything, knew that Job harboured rebellious thoughts, Job can justly be punished for having them even before he expresses them.) The neutrality story is interesting for its political implications, but however complex the sin it describes may be, its solution to the problems Job poses is very simple: Job was guilty, and God punished him.

In the second Midrash, what is being argued is that Job's suffering served a higher purpose, diverting Satan so that the children of Israel can escape to freedom. This turns Job into a kind of Hegelian resistance hero who, albeit unwittingly, is strong enough and righteous enough to plunge into the slaughterbank of history for the sake of other's lives or freedom.

Now consider at what is common to both of these readings, which can serve as typical ones. Both attempt to find meaning, or reason, in Job's suffering. For Job's friend Eliphaz is right to accuse Job of undermining religion, and crippling faith in God. If what Job says is true, our faith must be devastated. So traditional interpretations have sought to deny Job's claims by finding meaning, one way or another, in his suffering.

Without fully realising it, all these readings confirm the assumption that is the source of Job's outrage. That assumption is just this: there must be reason in the world, or Creation itself is unbearable. In particular, if misery occurs, it has to be explicable ― either as the consequence of some unknown transgression, or in the service of some greater good. Traditional interpretations fully accept these premises, and go on to try to discover the explanation implied in them.

This is a peculiar, back-handed vindication of Job himself, but it is about as helpful as the answers of Job's friends. Indeed, you may look at traditional readings of Job as variations on one or another of the friends' replies. And they do not address what contemporary readers find compelling in the book: the apparent and absolute meaninglessness of Job's suffering. Unlike earlier readers, we share Job's rage.

Just consider Job's tirade, in Stephen Mitchell's translation:

God damn the day I was born

And the night that forced me from the womb

On that day ― let there be darkness

Let it never have been created

Let it sink back into the void

Let chaos overpower it

Let black clouds overwhelm it

Let the sun be plucked from the sky.

As the curse goes on it is easy to see this passage as an anti-Genesis, a demand to undo all that which has been created, almost in the order which is set out at the very beginning of the Bible. Though Job remains modest enough to confine his fantasy to obliterating only the day he was born, the terms in which he speaks mirror the Creation story. This is indeed blasphemy, but in view of Job's claims we can take it seriously, as a comprehensible demand: let Creation be undone if it makes no sense.

We see how hard it would be to answer Job's charges. The Prologue begins by telling us that Job "was a man of perfect integrity, who feared God and avoided evil." It doesn't give us much to go on in grounding that claim, but the texts of the speeches show us what Job's integrity really was. Comparing his speeches with those of his friends, and even that of God Himself, it is not hard to feel that Job's unbending wisdom ― I don't mean sheer intelligence, which he has too, in spades ― is a match for every answer he is given. To Zophar he cries, "I am not an idiot! Who does not know such things?" This is before acknowledging, as he does several times, that God's wonders are beyond our grasp, that the human mind is simple, that only God is truly wise. Job does not demand that everything be explicable, nor deny that only God really fathoms the universe He has created.

Nor is his complaint a self-centred one, reducible to the question, "Why me?" It is true that he begins with his own case, which is natural enough ― it is his pain and his suffering, after a lifetime of decency, which cause him to doubt. But here it should be pointed out that it is not only the physical and emotional pain which drive him; Job's suffering is compounded by the fact that he is a man of integrity, with a strong sense of justice, and that sense has been violated. Perhaps a lesser man would have suffered less precisely because his pain was self-centred: however awful it may be to confront the loss of your wealth, and health, and even your children, it is not as awful as losing all of that and your belief in the justice and sense of the world as a whole.

As his rage and pain continue, Job generalises his own case, in terms that seem undeniable. In the starkest of terms he outlines the reasons for his impatience and horror: the wicked prosper, secure in their houses; not even their cows miscarry, and their grandchildren play like lambs. All this while the poor people shiver, picking up scraps for their children, and breaking their backs for the rich. This is, we will say, the way the world is; and only Job's friends, who cling to their dogmatic theorising, are able to ignore it. So their answers, Job says, are empty lies. It is just this weaving between his own case and others, between the particular and the universal, which gives his speech such power.

Nor will many of us be tempted to understand this text ― as some writers have done ― by seeking passages which show Job to be guilty, not quite of some secret sin, but of something we might call moral simplicity, even obtuseness. There is indeed one passage in which he sounds arrogant; another talks about settling of accounts like a businessman, which could seem to justify William Blake's idea that Job's initial piety and righteousness were superficial.

Yet the beautiful and genuine defence Job gives of his own decency, in his last speech, shows that this is a man who knows what goodness is about. Indeed, it must be the very fact of this speech that finally moves God to answer:

If I ever neglected the poor, or made the innocent suffer

If I ate my meals alone, and did not share with the hungry

If I did not clothe the naked, or care for the ragged beggar

If his body did not bless me for the warmth of my sheep's wool

If I ever abused the helpless, knowing that I could not be punished

Let my arm fall from my shoulder, and my elbow be ripped from its socket!

If I ever trusted in silver, or pledged allegiance to gold

If I laughed when my enemy fell, or rejoiced when suffering found him

If I ever covered my crimes, or buried my sins in my heart

Afraid of what people thought, shivering behind my doors ...

If my land cries out against me, its furrows weep together

May nettles grow there instead of wheat; instead of barley, stinkweed!

The text is at an end, the author unable, or unwilling, to say anything further. He has shown that Job knows what righteousness is, if anyone does; he has shown that Job can see the world more clearly than any of his friends; that his mind is keen enough to answer any theoretical attempt they offer to justify God's ways. And just to make certain that we do not dismiss Job's charges, the author calls up God Himself as a witness to their truth. Twice, in the epilogue, God chastises Job's friends: you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.

Before returning to this statement, the most compelling defence of Job, I want to address a modern indictment of Job which, some will argue, should lead us to reject Job's questions entirely. On this view Job is seen as lacking, not righteousness or humility, but maturity: Job's questions, and outrage, are based on naive, misguided assumptions about reward and punishment. For why should we think that the universe is just? Modern psychology explains how we come to share such assumptions: our parents raised us with sticks and carrots, so we project this pattern onto the universe at large.

Now there is no denying that some version of these claims is true. Some of us were raised in traditionally authoritarian homes where the connections between good behaviour and rewards, or bad behaviour and punishments, were made brutally clear. But most of us have, on becoming parents, concluded that some such connections are unavoidable, even if they are as simple as a sentence like: "If you pour the juice on the floor again, I'm taking away the cup." There are interesting and controversial studies on the psychology of moral development, showing how children get from the phase where good behaviour can only be connected with the desire for a reward, to the phase where they learn to act rightly for the sake of a principle.

Here there are many questions, and much work remains to be done. Still, the fact is that all of us were raised this way from our earliest, preconscious moments: so our deepest assumptions are connected with the expectation that if we only please mama and papa sufficiently, we'll get the story or the cookie or the hug. (Or, if you were particularly unlucky, the expectation that if you didn't please mama and papa sufficiently, you'd get a slap or a lash.) And all of the images of God as father that permeate most religions develop with, and through, these assumptions.

But to say that all this is true is not to bring us to the conclusion some have suggested: that Job's questions are meaningless, little more than a naive projection of a set of expectations onto a universe which we, as grownups, have learned cannot fulfil them. The conclusion that once you have described the origins of something you have accounted for it, or explained it, is what philosophers call the genetic fallacy. What is important is that understanding how we learn to have certain expectations of justice does not, by itself, invalidate them.

To see this, consider two things. First, few if any thinking theists ― and Job surely belongs to these ― have operated with naïve notions of God as the rewarding father. Job knows that things are at best murky, and that much is beyond his understanding; to expect that God provides instant or clear connections between behaviour and reward would be simply blind. Sometimes the friends talk this way, but we know they are the fall guys of the story, and even they admit that God's ways of meting out justice are mysterious. So no good theist uses as simple a notion of reward and punishment as the psychological objection supposes.

Second, you do not have to be a theist to expect justice from the world. Here is a quote from Max Horkheimer: "Reason rebels against the thought that the present state of reality is final, and that undeserved misfortunes and wrongdoing ― and not the self-sacrificing deeds of human beings ― are to have the last word." Immanuel Kant tells us that reason has a need to find, or create, a connection between happiness and virtue. The fact that we may have good psychological explanations of how this need develops ― of why reason rebels ― does not mean it isn't true. I believe that all our deepest, most immediate moral reactions presuppose just this need. Our despair when innocent people suffer, our indignation when wicked people flourish, presuppose reason's need to find a connection between virtue and happiness.

Up to this point, I have been defending Job's charges, just as he stated them. Pre-modern readers sought to reject them as impious or impatient; postmodern readers seek to dismiss them as childish. I have tried, very briefly, to sketch answers to them which show that Job's indictment is just as compelling as it ever was: the world, as created, is intolerably unjust.

But once we find Job's statement of the problem to be defensible, what do we say about the answer? It is hard to avoid feeling that if Job's charges are coherent, the answers given in the text are not. And because both the charges and the answers come close to exhausting the ones that can possibly be given, it is hard to avoid concluding that either there is no problem of evil, or there is no answer.

Let us take the friends' answers first. We know they are wrong, and not just because God says so. It is striking to watch how thoroughly they sink. In the beginning they are all that friends can be: they come immediately (there is a Midrash that tries to explain how they knew what had happened to him instantly, in an age without text messaging); they sit with him for seven days and nights and "said no word, for they saw that his grief was great." Unfortunately, they begin to talk. They begin with dogmatic and pious assertions. God's justice and omnipotence are undeniable, therefore Job must have sinned. And as they go on their answers get worse. No longer attempting to argue, they simply state:

It is true: the sinner is snuffed out

His candle flickers and dies.

Or they descend to the cruellest kind of ranting: "Your crimes must be inconceivable!" It is interesting to see that as the friends get weaker, Job rises to new heights. Where he may have begun with a curse and a cry of pain ― which does look simply like a particularly poetic version of the question Why me? ― what he ends with is a universal indictment.

But however horrible the friends may seem by the end, the beginning of their arguments deserves some attention. In particular, they make two claims that look very close to those made by the Voice from the Whirlwind. Eliphaz says:

[God's] workings are vast and fathomless

His wonders beyond our grasp.

Then further on:

When disaster strikes he will rescue you ...

You will see your family multiply

Your children flourish like grass

You will die at the height of your powers

And be gathered like ripe grain.

Is this not precisely what happens in the epilogue? Claims like this get repeated throughout the friends' early speeches; so what's wrong with them? How are they different from God's answer?

One suggestion is made by Job himself: "Your answers are dusty answers." One way of understanding this was offered by Kant, who said that Job's friends were like the dogmatic metaphysicians Kant was out to attack ― roughly, the Dr Pangloss whom Voltaire ridicules in Candide. What could this mean? The friends are content to theorise, they seek no personal encounter ― either with Job or with God. If you take this far enough you can even call them blasphemous, taking God's name in vain. What God wants is not mumbled piety, but deep and direct engagement.

Another reading of the phrase "dusty answers" could be: they are merely prose. A good translation makes them good prose, but the difference between the language used in their answers and that used by the "Voice from the Whirlwind" is vast. One thing this could mean is that answers to the problem of evil, if there are any, can only be given in poetry. Something about prose is too superficial, inadequate, even, again, blasphemous, because it is disrespectful ― insufficiently awed by the task.

I find something right in these suggestions, especially if you think about connections between poetry and music, and Job's connections to that. But they are not entirely convincing. I am still left feeling that there is not enough difference between the friends' answers and God's. And while we expect to be disappointed by the friends, I suspect that even atheists expect more from the voice of the Lord.

So let's now turn to the "Voice from the Whirlwind." At first glance, God's seems to be completely beside the point. "Where were you when I planned the earth?" is no answer to the question Job asked, for God's power was never at issue. Job questions His justice, not his omnipotence; and God's response seems to be merely a detailed description of His power. Even worse than begging the question, God's speech seems to be not only an assertion of power, but an assertion so brutal it amounts to absolute tyranny.

This is how Thomas Hobbes read the book ― a book Hobbes loved so well that he named his two major books after the creatures with which God's speech ends: Leviathan and Behemoth. Hobbes read the speech from the Whirlwind to make the sort of point for which he became famous: a kind of might-makes-right view in which the created world is so chaotic that submission to an absolute sovereign is the only wise course of action. And there is no doubt that this is the easiest way to read the speech, which then becomes less of an argument than an assertion of power.

Stephen Mitchell sums up most of our reactions well in saying that God's answer seems nothing but an angry "How dare you question the Creator of the world? Shut up now, and submit!" while Job's final response looks like a meekly uttered, "Yes, boss, anything you say." The brutality of that reaction is saved perhaps only by the very Jewish device of showing that God, provoked by Job's questions, replies with nothing less than a series of questions of His own.

There are, of course, other ways to read God's speech, and I want to sketch the most promising. When God begins by asking, "Where were you when I created the earth?" and then goes on to describe the wonders of Creation, He is not simply asserting His power. The point of going through all the details about the wild ass and the antelope is not to assert that, because God knows and does all kinds of things Job cannot do, He therefore has a right to absolute, unquestioned sovereignty. Nor is it the case, as some commentators have it, that God lists all these things in order to point out the weirdness of the world; to show that Creation is fraught with mysteries which humans cannot understand, so that Job, in particular, should stop troubling his head about this particular mystery.

Rather, one could take God's answer as precisely an assertion that there is order in the world, in exquisite detail. So if Job's question can be phrased thus: If grave justice occurs, is there no order/meaning/reason in the world? Then God's answer can be read as saying not Shut up, you weakling, but: You want order? I'll show you order.

There is support for this reading in a passage of Talmud, which suggests that Job said to God, "Perhaps a tempest passed before you, and caused you to confuse Iyob (Job) and Oyeb (enemy)." In other words, Job says: "Hey God! It's me, Job, your friend, not your enemy!" A partial quotation of the answer the Talmud gives to God is this:

"Many thunderclaps have I created in the clouds, and for each clap a separate path, so that two claps should not travel by the same path, since if two claps travelled by the same path they would devastate the world. I do not confuse one thunderclap with another, and shall I confuse Iyob and Oyeb? The wild goat is heartless with her young. When she crouches for delivery, she goes up to the top of a mountain so that the young shall fall down and be killed, and I prepare an eagle to catch it in his wings and set it before her, and if he were one second too soon or too late it would be killed. I do not confuse one moment with another, and shall I confuse Iyob and Oyeb?"

One thing this passage proclaims is the extraordinary system God has created, and continues to keep in motion. If Job's fear is that his own case shows that God makes mistakes, and hence that we may live in a world threatened by overwhelming chaos, God's answer is to reassure him of the incredible order which permeates the universe, and all its pieces.

A problem with this way of reading is that it may work for the first part of God's answer, but not the ending. Why does He end with the descriptions of the monsters? If the first part of His speech can be read as a glorious description of the wonderful order in the world, the second set of images is so horrible that it does look as if God is bludgeoning Job into submission, and in truly heartless ways.

But there are answers to this problem, too. One is that the Creation must include the horrible and the grotesque. God is not, as Leibniz would have it, a master watchmaker, nor is the world a place of simple order ― but it is order nonetheless, vast and awesome enough to include horror as well.

A possible counterpart to this comes from that part of Jewish tradition that denies God's omnipotence. God, on this view, created the world from primordial chaos. Elements of that chaos are still there and God is constantly working to keep them at bay, to maintain order against the threat of monstrous chaos. While this does something to explain the appearance of the monsters at the end of the monologue, it does so at the cost of turning God into a bit of a Jewish mother, whose answer to Job is: "You're coming to me about justice when I'm working day and night just to keep this total chaos from overwhelming us?" But better a Jewish mother, perhaps, than a more incomprehensible kind of tyrant ...

The biggest problem with this kind of reading is another one entirely. Job is not simply asking for evidence of order in the world; he is asking for evidence of moral order. And it is just that evidence which God refuses to give. Thus His answer becomes an old one: there is order, and reason, in Creation as a whole, but it is stupid or blasphemous to try to define that order in human categories, particularly human moral categories. This brings me to what I take to be, philosophically, Job's strongest and most provocative claim. He says:

Man who is born of woman -

How few and harsh are his days ...

And must You take notice of him?

Must You call him to account?

Since all his days are determined

and the sum of his years is set

Look away; leave him alone

Grant him peace, for one moment.

I take Job to be saying here that God cannot have it both ways. If the message we are to learn from all this is not to see things in merely human terms; to recognise that God has a plan for the whole universe ― of which we are only a tiny part ― then Job's answer is: fair enough, but if that is the case, why not just leave us alone? If You are going to notice us at all, then make things comprehensible, but do not try to have it both ways.

If we are merely insignificant pieces of a much larger picture that we are foolish to try to understand on our own terms, then God should leave us alone ― leave us alone meaning, without moral categories. Let us be part of nature and be torn apart like the vulture's prey which feeds its children, but do not tear us apart with the peculiarly human pain of guilt, and moral outrage, and all they imply. On the other hand, if You are going to give us those categories, and demand that we maintain them, then You have to be fair by reflecting them, somehow, in the structure of the universe. This could be called a covenant.

It is perhaps for this reason that God tells us, twice in the epilogue, that Job has spoken the truth about Him. In the speech from the Whirlwind, God's claim is put more paradoxically: "Am I wrong because you are right?" Thus three times in this book, the truth of Job's claims is asserted by none other than the One who should know. It is curious that this fact is not noted as often as it should be in many traditional interpretations. Or perhaps it is not so curious, for God's own testimony in favour of Job seems to undercut most interpretations, which in one way or another try to defend God's answer by showing Job's questions to be wrong. So we are left with the question: what could God mean by asserting that Job has spoken the truth ― or more provocatively, "Am I wrong because you are right?"

Let me conclude by sketching an answer inspired by Kant, who wrote a little essay on the subject entitled, "On the Impossibility of All Future Attempts at Theodicy."

I begin by accepting Kant's own claim that Job's friends represent the voice of pure reason, untainted by experience. The claims they assert are reasonable ones: the universe is ordered, its Creator is just. The problem with these claims is not their content but the fact that they are uttered without a bit of concern for experience: they are repeated blindly, dogmatically, refusing to look at the world as it is. Indeed, Kant goes so far as to accuse the friends of dishonesty: they are not speaking the truth, but speaking the words they believe God wants to hear ― just in case He might be eavesdropping.

The look at reality is provided by the Voice from the Whirlwind, whose speech is simply description ― glorious description, to be sure, but description all the same, of the way the world really is. The lack of moral categories, of a defence of just that universal justice which seemed to be called for, is what can make that speech seem inadequate.

If the Voice from the Whirlwind is meant to stand for the sheer assertion of reality, and the friends represent the claims of reason, what is the voice of Job? He is, in this picture, nothing other than the claim that the two ought to be brought together. Knowledge may depend on the recognition that the world does not exhibit the moral categories we demand, but justice depends on the recognition that it should. Here we would have to assume that God is not omnipotent, for His Creation as it stands is not final. Righteous people, like Job, are needed to make it whole. Abandoning traditional claims of divine omnipotence will be problematic for many, but that may be what facing reality requires.

As Kant would later put it, two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we look upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. They are both awesome and wonderful, but entirely separate ― the one stands for a cosmos described by the Voice from the Whirlwind, a cosmos so vast and impersonal that it strikes down our self-conceit and makes us feel, as Job put it, that we are but dust. Yet the moral law within me, which Job so beautifully upholds in his darkest hours ― he may wish he had never been born, but he never once wishes he had behaved anything less than righteously ― that moral law reveals our power to step in and change a piece of the world if it seems to be gone wrong.

Thus, while the book as a whole is a warning against arrogance, it is also a reminder of the need for moral action. Of course, this is explicitly denied by traditional readings, which suggest that passive acceptance of Creation, not an active attempt to change it, is the only wise attitude for human beings to hold. But then, as I mentioned at the beginning, traditional readings usually censored, or tried to read away crucial pieces of text. On the reading that I have been sketching, God Himself asserts the need for human moral vigilance, and action: "Am I wrong because you are right?"

Viewing Job's claim as the claim that reality should become reasonable is one way of seeing how both God and Job could speak the truth: the one a truth about the way the world is; the other, a truth about the way it should be. It is this that we call moral clarity, when we have the good sense or good fortune to achieve it.

The rationality of the world: A philosophical reading of the Book of Job.  By Susan Neiman.  ABC Religion & Ethics , April 29, 2019. 

Illustrations to the Book of Job by William Blake