Joshua Foa Dienstag

Philosophy & Social Criticism
http://psc.sagepub.com/
The pessimistic spirit

Joshua Foa Dienstag
Philosophy Social Criticism 1999 25: 71
DOI: 10.1177/019145379902500104
The online version of this article can be found at:

http://psc.sagepub.com/content/25/1/71
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for Philosophy & Social Criticism can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/25/1/71.refs.html
>> Version of Record - Jan 1, 1999
What is This?
Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

04 Dienstag (cr) D 12/11/98 1:39 pm Page 71
Joshua Foa Dienstag
The pessimistic spirit
Abstract Pessimism today is poorly understood. Indeed, such is the

disdain that pessimism engenders, that it often has difficulty being taken
seriously as a theoretical position. Yet pessimism, which is distinct from
skepticism and nihilism, has much to offer those who have discarded the
Enlightenment’s expectation of progress. Through an examination of
Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Unamuno, this paper traces out some of the
common themes of pessimistic thought. Pessimism, it is argued, is con-
cerned with the burden of time and with the problem of organizing the best
kind of human life in the absence of a promise of progress, happiness, or
salvation for society as a whole. But it need not urge passivity or resignation
in response to these conditions. The figure of Don Quixote, first appealed
to in this context by Unamuno, illustrates pessimism’s capacity to craft a
positive ethic of personal conduct for life in a disordered and disenchanted
world.
Key words Miguel de Cervantes · Don Quixote · history · nihilism ·

pessimism · progress · Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Arthur Schopenhauer ·
time · Miguel de Unamuno
The philosophers . . . always have this dilemma in their mouths to console

us for our mortal condition: ‘The soul is either mortal or immortal. If
mortal, it will be without pain; if immortal, it will go on improving.’ They
never touch the other branch: ‘What if it goes on getting worse?’
(Montaigne)
Pessimism today is treated like a mysterious tropical illness: its symp-
toms are largely unknown, but rumored to be horrible; brave opponents
dedicate their lives to combating the disease, but have difficulty locating
the pathogen; the infected are widely pitied, but are also so few that their
courageous caretakers regularly outnumber them. Such is the disdain
that pessimism engenders, even as it is poorly understood, that it often
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 25 no 1 • pp. 71–95

PSC
Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0191-4537(199901)25:1;71–95;006707]

72
Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (1)
has difficulty being taken seriously as a theoretical position. In fact, these
sentiments are neither well-founded nor particularly helpful. Far from
being widespread and infectious, pessimism is, if anything, quite rare in
our culture. When it appears, it is regularly attacked or mocked (or
both).1 But while it is doubtful that pessimism is a growing popular
belief, were that to be the case, we should not be so quick to quail at its
approach. For though the triumph of pessimism would not exactly be
grounds for celebration, there is a sense in which a dose of pessimism,
rightly administered, could serve as a vaccine against the paralyzing
effects of disorder and disenchantment, our true postmodern afflictions.
Pessimism can enable us, that is, to understand better our world and to
act within its limits. In order for it to serve that purpose, however, we
need first to disentangle pessimism from skepticism and nihilism, two
distinct perspectives with which it is regularly confused, conflated and,
too often, condemned.
Pessimism, as such, I shall argue, is a relatively new idea. It could
not have existed in the world before the Enlightenment. Certainly many
similar thoughts – skepticism, fatalism, millenarianism, nihilism and
general gloominess – did exist earlier, both in the West and in the East.
But none of these is exactly pessimism. For pessimism, I maintain,
something else is required, something which was not readily available
to earlier thinkers – not available, that is, as an unquestioned ground-
ing – and that is the linear notion of time. In this paper, after some
background on the idea of pessimism, I briefly survey three varieties of
it. First, through Rousseau, I consider what I label ‘cultural’ pessimism;
second, through Schopenhauer, ‘metaphysical’ pessimism; and third,
through Unamuno, ‘tragic’ pessimism. By cultural pessimism, I have in
mind those writers whose pessimism follows from a diagnosis of the
degenerative effects of civilization on the human species. The second
group includes those who believe human suffering to have a transcen-
dent, unalterable source in metaphysical or ontological realities. For
the third group, pessimism follows from an image of the human
condition as something essentially conflict-ridden and inconsolable.2
This typology is crude, but it will serve to indicate, if imperfectly, the
field in which each set of philosophers takes itself to be operating and
the sort of arguments they tend to deploy. The result of this survey is
my own attempt to sketch out a pessimistic ethic by appealing to
Cervantes’ Don Quixote as an exemplary text in this tradition. While
this attempt is inspired by Unamuno’s own invocation of that charac-
ter, the reading of Cervantes that I develop in the final section is largely
my own. Through the figure of Don Quixote, I believe, we can best see
how pessimism, rather than leading to resignation, in fact offers an
active answer to the question of how best to live in a world that it is
difficult to love.

73
Dienstag: The pessimistic spirit
Pessimism and progress: fraternal twin children of the
Enlightenment
The term ‘pessimism’ came into widespread use only in the middle of the
19th century. It is to some extent an anachronism, then, to apply it, as
I do in this paper, to earlier writers. But however late this term has
appeared in our language, it clearly names a persistent thought, or set
of thoughts, that has recurred often in social and political theory since
the Enlightenment. I hope to justify the anachronism, then, by showing
the strong family resemblance among the sorts of pessimism that have
appeared over time, even if only some of them have self-consciously
borne that label. Still, we will not arrive at a single, consecrated theory
of pessimism for the very plain reason that none exists, any more than
there is one dominant account of ‘progress’. In the latter vein, for
example, Mill, Marx and Dewey might all be said to have theories of
progress. But while this says something important about all of them, it
says little specific about any of them. To ask whose was the ‘purest’
theory of progress here would surely be a futile endeavor. Yet it still
makes sense to speak of a ‘modern theory of progress’, even if one must
garner its elements from multiple sources and even if it is impossible to
give these a final, definitive arrangement. To call someone a pessimist is
to do no more (and no less) than to identify a certain element of his or
her thought, an element which is susceptible of various developments.
As with progress then, we cannot comprehend pessimism through a
single exemplar but must consider a variety of minds. Not every account
of progress is one of cheerful, inexorable, uninterrupted advance and,
similarly, not every pessimism is one of dour, unalterable, unbroken
decline. Thus, in what follows, I neither follow a single chain of reason
derived from a particular author nor lay out the agreed-upon tenets of
a designated ‘school’ of thought, but rather explore the way a particu-
lar trope resonates through a series of writers, extracting some common
elements in the process. The most important of these elements is the
relationship of pessimism to ideas about time itself. But before coming
to this, let me attempt to locate some common conceptual and historical
background from which to begin.
Modernity, it is often claimed, invented the idea of progress. If this
proposition no longer receives universal assent, it might at least be
granted that there is a particular notion of progress that makes its
appearance only within modernity (however located and dated), and
which, indeed, is one of the defining elements of modernity. This concep-
tion of progress, it is generally held, relies for its very existence on a
linear conception of time. ‘Progress’ as such could not appear in or to
earlier European cultures (or non-European cultures), it is argued,
because their ideas about time were circular. The German historian

74
Reinhart Koselleck has perhaps given one of the more rigorous accounts
of this transformation of European time-concepts in Futures Past.3
Where circularity ruled, whether in the Mexico of the Aztecs (which had
two, interwoven circular calendars) or the Greece of the Homeric period
(which did not number its years), change could not truly be cognized
and history inevitably collapsed into myth, leaving no conceptual space
for an idea of progress or, indeed, any change over time. The triumph of
linear time in Europe, symbolized by the widespread adoption of the
Gregorian calendar, laid the groundwork for a theory of progress. Once
time was understood as unidirectional and non-repeating, historical
models of progress had a firm temporal framework on which to rest.
Whatever limitations this account has as a generalization about
premodern and non-western cultures, it is difficult to deny that it
captures some sort of truth, at least about how the modern European
mind has understood itself.4 What is surprising in this commonplace
conceptual history is that the linear notion of time should itself be so
rapidly assimilated to the idea of progress – as if progress and stasis were
the only two choices and the former is straightforwardly the result of
linear time while the latter is the simple result of circular time. (In essence
this is the complaint of Montaigne contained in the epigraph to this
paper.) Even if we limit ourselves to these two models of time (and part
of the problem with the commonplace conceptual history is that such a
limitation seems extreme), it is clear enough that there ought to be at
least one other option within linear time. Though progress may well
have become the dominant interpretation of linear time in the modern
era, we should not consider it the exclusive derivative of linearity. If the
idea of an ascent without limit is a modern one, the linear idea of time
which makes it possible also enables the thought of its opposite.5
I propose that we should think of pessimism as equally descended
from the modern notion of linear time and, hence, as equally a concep-
tual child of modernity. If it were simply a matter of thinking through
the meaning of linear time, one might imagine pessimism as plausible a
conclusion as progress for one seeking a larger pattern to history. But,
of course, it is not simply the case that conceptions of history derive
directly from theories of time and, if pessimism is indeed a child of
modernity, it would have to be considered a prodigal – one rarely seen
and, when seen, often ill-recognized, indeed often diagnosed as an
ailment rather than a philosophy. While faith in progress is much dimin-
ished of late, to be a pessimist is still to be, at best, an oddball and, at
worst, someone with a negative and unpleasant character.6 But
pessimism has a (largely unappreciated) history as long as that of
progress and one which might perhaps be of some use to us as the idea
of progress becomes a more questionable one.7 If we find it impossible
to imagine a return to a circular view of history, and if narratives of

75
progress seem equally mythical, then we ought to reflect more on the
non-progressive, linear accounts of time that remain – and this means
pessimism. The pessimistic philosophers have been mining a vein of
modernity whose value to us may increase as the alternatives decline in
plausibility.
We must, therefore, learn to avoid thinking of pessimism as a
psychological disposition somehow linked to depression or contrariness.
It is one of the regular slanders applied to pessimists that their philo-
sophy should be understood as the result of their discontent or mirth-
lessness.8 Treating pessimism as a disposition robs it of its seriousness
and transforms it into a mere complaint, one with which some people
are mysteriously and unfortunately stricken. The absurdity of such an
approach can best be illustrated by imagining an interpretation of Mill,
say, that attributes his ideas about progress to his sunny disposition. Nor
would anyone attribute Marx’s belief in a coming communist utopia to
the lucky accident of an upbeat persona. Yet it is regularly suggested with
all seriousness that Schopenhauer’s pessimism, for example, derives from
some condition of genetic unhappiness.9 We must divorce the concept of
pessimism from that of unhappiness as thoroughly as we separate
theories of progress from happiness. Happiness and unhappiness, it
ought to go without saying, have existed forever. But pessimism, like
progress, is a modern idea.
The cultural pessimism of Rousseau

For cultural pessimists such as Rousseau, the human race is caught in
an immense paradox.10 The development of our reason, he maintains,
is both pleasurable and useful at the individual level. Yet, at the social
level, because it weakens the foundations of our belief-systems, such
development leads to a corresponding moral decline. Though
Rousseau surely does not originate the idea that increasing cultural and
scientific sophistication are inevitably tied to a certain kind of moral
decrepitude, he gives it one of its most famous and imaginative treat-
ments and its first fully modern one. His pessimism thus derives from
a particularly ironic understanding of cultural history whereby the
human spirit suffers not just in spite of progress, but actually because
of ‘progress’.11
For Rousseau, this idea can be considered a fundamental one,
appearing as it does as a central theme in his earliest published political
theory, the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and the Discourse on the
Origin of Inequality. In these essays he traces several paths by which
progress is transmuted or refracted into its opposite. These stories
combine to create a nearly mathematical certainty that ‘our souls have

76
become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have
advanced toward perfection’ (Rousseau, 1986: 7). In the First Discourse,
the primary argument concerns the spread of luxury: ‘Luxury is seldom
found without the sciences and the arts, and they are never found with-
out it. . . . [And] luxury is diametrically opposed to good morals’
(Rousseau, 1986: 16). The material prosperity that scientific progress
has brought (at least to certain classes) is, Rousseau argues, necessarily
combined with moral decline. The reasoning is familiar enough: to what-
ever degree luxury becomes an end in itself, it must at the least distract
from morality, which requires self-discipline. Thus, ‘A taste for ostenta-
tion is scarcely ever combined in one soul with a taste for the honest.
No, Minds debased by a host of futile cares cannot possibly ever rise to
anything great; and even if they had the requisite strength, they would
lack the courage’ (Rousseau, 1986: 17). Rousseau follows this assertion
of a social law with a variety of examples meant to substantiate it. The
history of the Greeks and Romans demonstrate ‘that military virtue died
out among them in proportion as they began to be knowledgeable about
Paintings, Etchings, goldsmiths’ vessels, and to cultivate the fine arts’
(Rousseau, 1986: 19). The body accustomed to luxury becomes soft and
pliant and the soul correspondingly loses the firmness necessary for self-
denial, the foundation of virtue.
Up to this point the critique has a familiar, sermonizing tone. But
Rousseau’s argument, while fashioned to resemble traditional Stoic-
Christian doctrine, is in fact far from imitating it. What to earlier moral-
ists were simply timeless truths about human frailty are, to Rousseau,
events that take place on a particular timeline of human history. The
evils of luxury, its corrupting effects, are to Rousseau merely a subset of
the larger change that has come about in the modern world: the develop-
ment of inequality. And inequality results from nothing less than the
development of thought itself. The decline of morals, rather than result-
ing from weakness, evil character, or a philosophical error that further
learning could alleviate, is instead seen to derive directly from mental
growth: ‘It is reason that engenders vanity, and reflection that reinforces
it; It is what turns man back upon himself. . . . It is Philosophy that
isolates him’ (Rousseau, 1986: 162). For humans to ‘reflect’ means that
they dwell more upon themselves. They become more individuated and
thus more interesting to themselves: ‘his first look at himself aroused the
first movement of pride in him’ (Rousseau, 1986: 172). Concomitantly,
their identification with others declines and with it their sense of moral
obligation. Thus while human reason is ‘perfected’, the species is ‘de-
teriorating’ (Rousseau, 1986: 168). Each intellectual accomplishment,
though individually admirable, only fuels Rousseau’s pessimism about
humanity as a whole. No philosophy, however moral or ascetic, could
cure the disease of Philosophy itself.

77
Ultimately, this attitude can be understood as a critique of the arti-
ficiality of modernity, an artificiality destined to grow with the passage
of time.12 In the modern world ‘to be and to appear became two entirely
different things’ (Rousseau, 1986: 180). And appearance, fueled by intel-
lect, ultimately overpowers the natural world from which it sprang until
‘Society no longer offers to the eyes of the wise man anything but an
assemblage of artificial men and factitious passions which are the prod-
uct of all these new relationships and without true foundation in Nature’
(Rousseau, 1986: 198). Societies that have reached this condition ‘have
assumed their final forms: no longer is anything changed except by arms
and cash’ (Rousseau, 1986: 294). This, then, is the result for Rousseau
of everything which modern society has called progress. Intellectual
development and moral sturdiness are locked in a zero–sum struggle,
which the latter is bound to lose, for the former accumulates steadily as
time passes while the forces of the latter are fixed in and by timeless,
unchanging nature. Nor does this decline lead to a cyclical renewal;
society assumes a ‘final form’.
The source of Rousseau’s pessimism must be understood as a kind
of social theory, one particularly reliant on the linear passage of time.
Indeed, without such an account of time, the theory hardly makes sense.
What separates humans from animals, and subjects them to this nega-
tive social dynamic, is their faculty for ‘perfectibility . . . which, by dint
of time, draws [them] out of that original condition in which [they]
would spend calm and innocent days’ (Rousseau, 1986: 149). The
phrase ‘by dint of time’ may appear incidental here, but in fact the
passage of time is a necessary part of the functioning of this faculty.
Why? First, perfectibility is primarily a capacity for the human beings to
envision themselves as different than they are. It is a capacity for a
certain kind of imagination – an imagination for self-transformation
over time. In this sense, it is consciousness of time itself, and its possib-
ilities, which animals do not possess. Only human beings change over
time, Rousseau argues, while an animal species ‘is after a thousand years
what it was in the first year of those thousand’ (Rousseau, 1986: 149).
Primitive humans are much the same and ‘yield [themselves] wholly to
the sentiment of [their] present existence, with no idea of the future’
(Rousseau, 1986: 151). What alters this is the development of language,
which allows human beings to learn about existences other than their
own, thus providing a new raw material for their intelligence. The desire
of imitating others, of being other than what one originally is, is there-
fore itself not an inborn desire, but a product of society and time. It is
a desire, furthermore, which must intensify over time since those who
first act on this desire can only provide fuel for others to do the same,
thus initiating a vast cycle of vanity and imitation – a cycle indistin-
guishable from intellectual development. The primordial knowledge,

78
then, is the knowledge that we exist in linear time and are therefore cap-
able of changing over time. Humanity’s fall into intelligence is, indeed,
a fall into time, for only in time can we be perpetually dissatisfied with
ourselves.13 Animals live in this linear condition just as we do; it is our
consciousness of this fact which makes all the difference.
What remains implicit in Rousseau’s account is the necessity for the
time in question to be linear in order to have the effects he ascribes to
it. None of his arguments for the progressive accumulation of intellect
or the corresponding decline of morals would make sense if history were
cyclical or had some other form. The one-way street of human history
that Rousseau theorizes requires, as a premise, that such directionality
is possible. Indeed, for Rousseau, it seems to be that very possibility itself
– the openness of linear time – that creates the initial impetus for the
course that history follows. Nor can this time-consciousness merely be
a self-deception on our part, for then pessimism would not be called for;
if time were cyclical all declines would be temporary and our illusions
would be corrected by the course of history. Our consciousness of time
is a true piece of intelligence and it is for this reason that its disastrous
effects on our morals are irreversible. In a sense, human intelligence and
the experience of time are, at their roots, one and the same – for know-
ledge as Rousseau understands it requires time and the experience of
time is thus the first bit of knowledge that humans acquire as they leave
the status of animals behind. It is the modern notion of linear time, then,
that stands behind his history and transforms a stoic moralism into a
modern pessimism. Far from being a case of grumpiness or perversity
then, Rousseau’s pessimism is a theoretical position embedded in a web
of social, psychological and historical beliefs. As a theory, moreover, it
is neither skeptical nor nihilistic. Indeed, it is precisely in terms of moral
values (in this case quite traditional ones) that it measures the cumula-
tive and unmeliorably destructive effects of time on the human
condition.
The metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer

The sources of Schopenhauer’s pessimism are, at first glance, quite differ-
ent. He posits no earlier golden age. Unlike Rousseau, he does not really
believe that the study of history leads to a greater understanding of the
human condition: ‘the material of history appears to us as scarcely an
object worthy of the serious and arduous consideration of the human
mind’ (Schopenhauer, 1994: 107). He denies that there is any general
historical pattern, whether of improvement or decline, worth mention-
ing: ‘The true philosophy of history . . . consists in the insight that, in
spite of all these endless changes and their chaos and confusion, we yet

79
always have before us only the same identical, unchangeable essence’
(Schopenhauer, 1994: 109–10). Despite his occasional points of admi-
ration for Rousseau, he considers history largely the province of
‘Hegelian pseudophilosophy’, and evinces little interest in its vicissi-
tudes. Pessimism to Schopenhauer means not that our civilization or
morality are declining, but that human beings are fated to endure a life
whose pleasures are always outweighed by its sufferings. His pessimism
is, therefore, as universal as it is severe: ‘If the immediate and direct
purpose of life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted
to its purpose in the world’ (Schopenhauer, 1970: 41). No particular
social dynamic brings him to this conclusion, but neither is his pessimism
merely the product of a dyspeptic temper. Rather it is established by a
series of metaphysical propositions.
Following Kant, Schopenhauer argues that human consciousness is
predicated on the conceptual a prioris of space, time and causality
(Schopenhauer, 1958: I, 5–13). These ‘forms of consciousness’, as he
calls them, condition all particular perceptions and thoughts and, for
this reason, are themselves the only things which can really be known.
Of these, however, time is repeatedly singled out as ‘the first and most
immediate form’ (Schopenhauer, 1958: II, 502). The other two are
important for ‘outer knowledge’, that is, for perception, but internal
reflection ‘is free from the two forms belonging to outer knowledge, the
form of space and the form of causality’ (Schopenhauer, 1958: II, 197).
So, ultimately, consciousness has ‘not space as its form, but only time’
(Schopenhauer, 1958: II, 137). As with Rousseau, it will be from this
connection of time and consciousness that a pessimism results; in this
case, one far more unremitting. No particular historical process alters
these fundamental circumstances within which the human mind finds
itself.
The sum of those circumstances, according to Schopenhauer, is that
life itself has no particular meaning, other than suffering, and that the
only proper response to this situation is resignation, withdrawal and
self-denial. This equation of human existence and suffering derives, in
the first place, from time as a universal form of consciousness. Time ‘is
the form by whose means that vanity of things appears as their transi-
toriness, since by virtue of this all our pleasures and enjoyments come
to nought in our hands’ (Schopenhauer, 1958: II, 574). Here we have an
updated version of the image of Chronos devouring his children. What-
ever we value, we must inevitably lose it. As our consciousness proceeds
through time, we learn chiefly that time must in the end destroy all our
‘objects of will’. For Schopenhauer, this transitoriness demonstrates the
worthlessness of these objects, no matter what they may be.14 Since we
value them, however, we are bound to suffer at their loss, and this suffer-
ing can only grow with the passage of time. As our losses mount, so must

80
our unhappiness with the world and with our life. To avoid this loss, we
can only attempt to withdraw from the world and to cease placing value
on worldly goods. But since time is the fundamental element of our
consciousness, this withdrawal can never be entirely successful.
Like Rousseau, Schopenhauer draws a contrast between the human
experience of life and that of the animals. Here too, it is the matter of
time which separates humans from animals and imposes on the former
a special burden. Animal minds are limited ‘to the present moment: the
animal is the present incarnate’ (Schopenhauer, 1970: 45). Animals do
not possess the temporal a priori that is the fundamental form of human
consciousness. Not only does this permit the animal not to suffer from
the transitoriness of objects and events, it also protects it from the worst
thought of all: ‘The animal lives without any real knowledge of
death. . . . With man the terrifying certainty of death necessarily
appeared along with the faculty of reason’ (Schopenhauer, 1958: II,
463). Death is not so much a fact to Schopenhauer as it is the summa-
tion of the transitoriness of our conscious experience. To the transcen-
dent will, death is a non-event, but to a human being, whose
consciousness is fundamentally formed by time, death is the inevitable
outcome of all activity. Our every experience thus contains within it a
hidden presentiment of death, and this poisons our ability to enjoy life
by demonstrating to us, at every moment, its meaninglessness:
Everything is powerfully intensified by thinking about absent and future

things, and this is in fact the origin of care, fear and hope, which, once they
have been aroused, make a far stronger impression on men than do actual
present pleasures or sufferings, to which the animal is limited. . . . Through
all this, however, the measure of suffering increases in man far more than
the enjoyment, and it is very greatly enhanced specifically by the fact that
he actually knows of death, while the animal only instinctively flees it.
(Schopenhauer, 1970: 44–5)
The experience of time does not intensify all feeling but specifically
intensifies anxiety and fear. It does so by operating both forward and
backward. On the one hand, we suffer from the anxiety over the future:
our normal, animal suffering is multiplied by our ability to anticipate its
continuation and culmination in death. On the other hand, the past
immediately drains whatever satisfaction we derive from the present:
‘Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our
hands and loses all real value’ (Schopenhauer, 1970: 51). Not only do
our satisfactions fail to make the impression on our consciousness that
our sufferings do, but this effect, too, is magnified by the escape of the
present into the past. The ‘perishability of all things existing in time’ is
that which ought to make clear to us the vanity and uselessness of all
striving. One might, Schopenhauer admits, draw the conclusion from

81
this that the proper approach to life is to live in the moment and enjoy
it, ‘But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly: for
that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as
a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort’ (Schopenhauer, 1970:
51–2). It is senseless to go to any effort to improve one’s life when the
results, even when positive, must immediately slip away into the past.
And while Schopenhauer believes that there is a transcendent realm
where Ideas and the thing-in-itself dwell eternally, apart from time, no
conscious human contact with such a realm is possible and it therefore
has no effect on actual human lives, except, at a conceptual level
perhaps, to demonstrate their insignificance (Schopenhauer, 1958: I,
176).15 Thus, as Schopenhauer famously put it, life is like a business the
receipts of which do not cover its expenses. The passage of time
constantly and relentlessly transforms life into death, thereby robbing
life of its meaning. Human existence ‘is a continual rushing of the pres-
ent into the dead past, a constant dying’ (Schopenhauer, 1958: I, 311).
As in the case of Rousseau, however, it is not the experience of time
as such, but specifically of modern, linear time that creates the problems
Schopenhauer describes. It is one of the virtues of circular time that
things are conserved. Schopenhauer’s speaking of time as that which
drains experience of all meaning demonstrates that he does not consider
such circularity as possible. Time, to him, ‘extends infinitely in both
directions’, that is, in two (and only two) opposite directions, a past and
a future that never overlap and never end (Schopenhauer, 1958: I, 280).
Indeed, Schopenhauer considers linearity to be inseparable from time
itself: ‘succession is the whole essence and nature of time’ (Schopenhauer,
1958: I, 8). Of course, time passes even for those who believe it to be
ultimately circular. But for succession to be the ‘whole essence’ of time,
the time in question must be strictly and unforgivingly linear.
It is not so much that events or actions themselves have no value for
him as that the passage of time instantly and irrevocably condemns such
value to the non-existence of the past. Though it relies on no particular
history (like Rousseau’s), Schopenhauer’s pessimism is nonetheless
bound to an account of time; or rather, it is the fact that human beings
are time-bound creatures that accounts for his pessimism, rather than
any particular judgment about historical decline. Only that which tran-
scends time, which truly endures, which ‘is not a representation but a
thing-in-itself’, has for him any meaning (Schopenhauer, 1958: I, 119).
And no human experience meets this stringent condition.
Thus Schopenhauer recommends self-denial in the strictest sense,
not merely as a set of ascetic habits, but as denial of the will-to-live itself.
The individual consciousness is predicated on a sense of time understood
as endless succession. Its basic sense of self is thus one of continued exist-
ence through time. Yet it is this elemental sense of time that condemns

82
the human consciousness to unhappiness. Self-denial is thus the only
prescription that can be made to minimize the suffering of this human
consciousness. Far from being a matter of disposition, then, Schopen-
hauer’s pessimism is rooted in his metaphysics and in his special under-
standing of the effects of time.
The tragic pessimism of Unamuno

Echoes of both Rousseau and Schopenhauer can be found in the texts
of Miguel de Unamuno. But The Tragic Sense of Life and Unamuno’s
other books derive the dire situation of humanity in a partly novel way
and, more importantly, point toward a unique response to it. For while
it is often assumed that the resignation Schopenhauer prescribes is the
only viable response to pessimism, this is far from being the case. The
time-boundedness of the human condition evoked in Unamuno a
response that, while still within the bounds of pessimism, is consider-
ably more active.
The human condition, to Unamuno, is one of constant, unsolvable
warfare – not a Hobbesian warfare between individuals, however, but
one within individuals. Every human being is composed, among other
things, of his or her passion for life, on the one hand, which insists on
creating and finding meaning and possibility in the world, and reason,
on the other, which insists on dismantling them:
I long on the one hand for unending life, and on the other hand claim that
this life is devoid of the value assigned to it. A contradiction? I should say
so! The contradiction between my heart which says Yes, and my head which
says No! Naturally there is a contradiction. . . . Since we live solely from
and by contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is in the perpet-
ual struggle without hope or victory, then it is all a contradiction.
(Unamuno, 1967–70: IV, 17)16
Unamuno calls the first impulse the ‘hunger for immortality’. More
like Rousseau’s sense of perfectibility than Schopenhauer’s metaphysical
will, this hunger is, for Unamuno, a universal, if not transcendent,
human characteristic. While he can admit the existence of individuals
who lack it, such people are, to him, emotionally deformed. Though he
speaks of the hunger for immortality largely as a religious impulse, and
finds its expression largely in religion, its origins lie somewhere deeper.
And like Rousseau and Schopenhauer, he finds its meaning by identify-
ing that which separates humanity from animal existence:
. . . it may surely be said that what most distinguishes man from other
animals is that in one way or another he keeps his dead, refusing to hand
them over to the indifference of teeming mother earth. [Consciousness]

83
finds itself confronted with this alien world and realizes it is a thing apart,
and must long then for another life not of this world. . . . This cult, not of
death, but of immortality, originates and keeps religions. (Unamuno,
1967–70: IV, 46–7)
The desire to live, the impulse towards life itself, Unamuno believes,
precedes any particular beliefs and gives them their animating force. Or
rather, it is the need for animating ideas that gives rise to our religions
and philosophies, which in turn ultimately serve the purpose of giving
us reasons to live.
But reason, once activated, cannot be forced to serve the impulse
towards life that brought it into existence. Indeed, reason is ultimately
compelled to oppose the hunger for immortality, just because the latter
is irrational: ‘Everything passes! That is the refrain of all . . . who have
savored the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge’ (Unamuno, 1967–70: IV,
45). Whatever else we learn, through the employ of reason, we learn first
of all of our own mortality. Reason turns on the impulse for immortal-
ity, skeptical of any belief in it: ‘it always appears that reason confronts
our longing for personal immortality and contradicts us. And the truth
is that reason is the enemy of life’ (Unamuno, 1967–70: IV, 100). Here
Unamuno follows Schopenhauer: through reason, humans have fore-
knowledge of death, rather than the animal’s instinctive aversion to it.
This knowledge poisons our every attempt to give our lives immortal
meanings.
Here then is the source of ‘the tragic sense of life’: we are trapped
between reason and life, between heaven and earth. And we must remain
so. To escape entirely to either side would make life unbearable. If we
could truly give up the hunger for immortality, we would lose the will
to live. Reason alone cannot provide one. Indeed reason tends ‘to reduce
everything to identities and genera’ while life is composed of change and
difference. The intellect seeks ‘identity, which is death’ (Unamuno,
1967–70: IV, 100). Reason seeks to petrify everything in order to under-
stand it. Its work is thus opposed to life which cannot rest in a static
identity.
If, on the other hand, we gave ourselves over entirely to faith in
immortality, we would lose our humanity: ‘faith – life – can sustain itself
only by depending upon reason, which will make it transmissible – trans-
missible, especially, from me to myself; that is, reflective and conscious’
(Unamuno, 1967–70: IV, 125). Pure faith would be too akin to an
animal’s instincts: unwavering, unquestioned – and thus unreflective,
inhuman and pathetic. What separates the will to life from the instinct
for self-preservation is precisely the former’s reflective character.
Animals do not commit suicide, but neither do they keep their dead. To
return to this condition would be to give up our human distinctiveness.
Fortunately, humans rarely achieve either form of certainty. For both

84
the most committed rationalist and the most committed believer ‘a
muffled voice, the voice of uncertainty, murmurs in his spirit’s ear: “Who
knows?”. . . How, without this uncertainty, could we ever live?’
(Unamuno, 1967–70: IV, 131). The tragedy lies, then, not particularly
in the conflict between reason and life, but in the irremediability and
violence of that conflict, which Unamuno likens to warfare: ‘the tragic
history of human thought is simply one of struggle between reason and
life – reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing it to submit to the
inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to
serve as a support for its own vital desires’ (Unamuno, 1967–70: IV,
118). Despite the necessity of this conflict, no truce between the two
forces may be called. We can ignore neither our presentiment of death,
nor our desire for immortality, nor the conflict between them.
As with the theories of Rousseau and Schopenhauer, however, this
conflict too can be understood as a product of time and as a result of the
human condition within time. The particular conflict between mortality
and immortality that Unamuno describes could come about only within
linear time. Mortality, in the sense Unamuno means it – the final and
complete end to one’s existence – is not really compatible with circular
time, in which everything recurs in one form or another. Not that some-
one with a circular notion will not fear death, of course; but to fear death
as that which puts a permanent end to one’s existence requires a simul-
taneous belief that nothing recurs. As many anthropologists have pointed
out, ideas of circularity provide a kind of reassurance in the face of death
which modern religions can match only by way of eschatology. Ideas of
heaven become more important as the idea of a return to the earth
becomes less plausible. The linear account of time is more frightening
because of this gap. Whatever truth there is in Unamuno’s contention that
the fear of death is a universal one, it must at least be acknowledged that
this fear is intensified by the emergence of linear time. A parallel point can
be made for immortality. The drive for immortality, though Unamuno
depicts it as something unalterably human, derives at least in part from
modern notions of time. A certain kind of immortality is already promised
to those whose notion of time is circular; as such, immortality becomes a
problem only when life is subjected to linear time. To say that humans
strive for immortality is to say they fear they do not naturally possess it.
And this fear makes sense only within linear time.
It is not surprising, then, that Unamuno alternately depicts the tragic
struggle as one between reason and memory. Immortality of a sort is to
be found in memory and this too can be a response to the deadening
effects of reason: ‘Intelligence is a dreadful matter. It tends toward death
in the way that memory tends toward stability’ (Unamuno, 1967–70: IV,
100). The will to be remembered, correlate of the hunger for immortal-
ity, is one of the most powerful and divisive:

85
The passion to be remembered if possible when oblivion overtakes all others
is tremendous. From it flows envy, the cause, according to the biblical narra-
tive, of the crime which began human history: the murder of Abel by his
brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread: it was a struggle to survive in
God, in the divine memory. (Unamuno, 1967–70: IV, 62)
The tragic condition of life is not just a matter of existential angst; it is
the source of all those conflicts that arise from the desire to be remem-
bered, the desire for fame. So long as we live within time, memory is a
second-best kind of immortality. Whereas in Rousseau a human
tendency towards vanity meets with a moral rebuke, for Unamuno the
desire to be remembered is no more than an extension of the will to live.
Its clash with reason can be lamented, but not hectored out of existence.
Unamuno’s pessimism is not one of historical decline, but rather of
continuous tragic conflict with the different elements of the human soul
locked in endless opposition to one another. If time is truly linear, then
this is a sentence of eternal torment. As I will argue, however, Unamuno
points us toward an unresigned response to this tragic condition in his
discussion of Don Quixote.
Pessimism’s time
The burden of time is the theme that unites these three strands of
pessimism, even if they do not always call explicit attention to it. For
Rousseau, linear time is that within which social dynamics operate and
work themselves out. Even the sentiment for perfectibility, which
Rousseau sometimes describes as inborn, makes no sense without this
form of time. There would be no perfectibility, indeed no belief in change
at all, for creatures whose notion of time was something other than
linear. For Schopenhauer, linear time itself is explicitly acknowledged as
the author of our unhappiness. It robs us of all that we have and burdens
us with worry for the future. Our lives, for him, are empty of meaning,
and it is precisely this kind of time that has emptied them. In Unamuno’s
theory, the two basic animating impulses do battle only on the basis of
linear time: one seeking immortality, the other seeking to drive home the
lesson of mortality. Without linear time, neither sentiment would be
comprehensible and the problem each presents would not exist. To say
that we live ‘within’ contradictions, as Unamuno does, is to say that we
constantly live with problems that time creates, problems with no ‘solu-
tion’ other than death.
To be a pessimist, then, is to feel the problem of time most acutely. It
is to feel that the expulsion from timeless Eden (or rather, from animal
unconscious) into the knowledge of time was indeed a loss of some kind.
It is to believe that our time-bound condition creates enormous barriers

86
to human happiness. Linear time creates expectations, memories and the
sentiment of transience in a different register from those of circular time.
Though the emphasis varies between these three writers, it is this collec-
tion of experiences which animates their pessimism. If the idea of progress
is a modern one, rooted in the post-Renaissance belief in linear time, then
so too must the pessimistic spirit be accounted modern. Furthermore, the
sentiments these authors describe may find increasing expression when
we discard the idea in progress while retaining the belief in linear time.
Pessimism, that is, may be the attitude with which we are stuck, much
against our own will, in a world which has neither the faith of the
premodern in recurrence nor the rational expectations of the Enlighten-
ment in progress – in other words, in the late modern (or postmodern)
world in which we now live. It is our predicament to live in an age that
has come to doubt the existence of progress without being able to return
to the comfort of myth. As a philosophy, pessimism both describes this
situation and explains why we feel it to be a loss as well as a liberation.
Pessimism, then, is a modern idea, where both of these terms require
stress. It is modern in that it relies for its meaning on a linear sense of
time which has only become predominant in the last few centuries. And
it is an idea, a suggestion for how to come to terms with this time, and
not merely an expression of depressive feelings on the part of its expos-
itors. Why then, if pessimism apparently presents a point of view at least
appropriate for our times, does it meet with such immediate and uniform
resistance? Perhaps it is not so much that the diagnosis is wrong but that,
were it to be admitted, without a corresponding palliative, it would be
too depressing to live with. Nobody wants to be known as a pessimist,
if only because it seems to give one’s audience an excuse to stop listen-
ing. Even if suffering is inevitable, why compound it with a recitation of
the facts? More importantly though, pessimism requires us to give up a
comforting set of expectations about life that the myth of progress
provides. As Schopenhauer put it:
Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents
life as a desirable state and man’s happiness as its aim and object. Starting
from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happi-
ness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he
believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point
of his existence. (Schopenhauer, 1958: II, 584)
It is not that pessimism forces us to give up happiness; we are unlikely

to possess that in any case. Rather, pessimism requires us to abandon
the sense of injustice and self-pity with which we currently salve our
pain. It disallows any claim of righteousness or desert as compensation
for our suffering. Much more difficult to accept than a life of misery is
the idea that we have no right to anything better.

87
A pessimistic ethic
Is there any active response to be made to this dilemma or must the
pessimistic spirit be content with the brutal honesty of its position?
Without progress through time, is there anything to live for?17 The three
figures I have discussed respond to the question in rather distinctive
ways. The responses of Rousseau (a retrenchment of pre-modern ethics)
and Schopenhauer (a quasi-Buddhist withdrawal from existence) are
fairly well known. I would suggest that neither of them quite meets the
problem head on – but rather than working out my objections at length,
I would like to elaborate on Unamuno’s alternative. For in Cervantes’
Don Quixote, as Unamuno suggested, we have a figure who both
acknowledges the pessimistic appraisal of the human condition and is
not thereby paralyzed – indeed, he is invigorated by it. Unlikely as it may
seem, we have in this text the resources with which to develop a
pessimistic ethic that is neither resigned nor reactionary. As I said at the
outset, while I am indebted to Unamuno for suggesting this path, the
course which it follows from this point is not necessarily the one he
charted and he should not be held responsible for it.
It is no accident that Unamuno devoted one of his longest works to
a painstaking analysis of Don Quixote. If the human condition is
inevitably a tragic one, then perhaps this most tragic of heroes, one
whose actions can only be understood as a kind of madness, may prove
to know the most sensible course of action. For Unamuno’s pessimism
is not to him a counsel of despair. On the contrary, he believes that
tragedy can be a stimulant to life if not a panacea for its sufferings
(Unamuno, 1967: IV, 118). Don Quixote represents this wellspring of
life to Unamuno, life in all its splendor and tragedy.
That the world Cervantes created for Don Quixote fits the
pessimistic image is clear enough. The Knight of the Mournful Counten-
ance wanders through a poor, violent and disordered Spain. Many of the
people he encounters are cruel and others are criminals or con artists of
one type or another. His squire Sancho Panza, we are repeatedly told, is
loyal, at least at first, as much from simplicity and greed (Don Quixote
has promised him an island to govern) as from any better qualities. In
short, the setting is one of rapacity and conflict where happiness is not
to be expected by anyone besides the extremely rich and powerful, and
even for them it is perpetually insecure. Most of all, Don Quixote under-
stands his world as one which is sadly descended from a better age.
Where once knights-errant roamed the world enforcing justice, now he
alone remembers and embraces the values of this earlier time.
For acting in this world according to the principles of chivalry, Don
Quixote is repeatedly called a madman by nearly everyone with whom
he comes into contact. When he reveals his purpose he is generally

88
mocked and when he tries to put it into effect, his efforts are nearly
always futile and harmful to himself. This situation is typified by the
famous scene in which Don Quixote tilts at the windmills, after mistak-
ing them for evil giants, only to have the windmill rip the lance from his
grip, destroy it and knock him and his horse to the ground as effectively
as any evil giant might have done (Cervantes, 1981: 59).
This episode occurs in the first few pages of the book and is often
taken to stand metonymically for the work as a whole. In fact, however,
as the work progresses, other themes begin to emerge. Most importantly,
though Don Quixote’s madness continues to be remarked on by the
narrator, other characters, for a variety of reasons, become drawn into
it. Some merely seek to humor him, others do so for their own amuse-
ment, still others hope to use him to their own advantage. Little by little,
however, one realizes that despite the mockery and abuse he is forced to
endure, Don Quixote, rather than having to give up his ideals and heroic
stories, ends by having remade the world around him in his own image.
Sooner or later, nearly all the other characters interact with Quixote on
his terms, rather than their own. So much is this the case that, on his
death-bed at the end of the book, when he comes to his senses and
renounces his former behavior, his friends beg him to take up his
madness and once again act as Don Quixote.18 At the outset of the book,
when his identity is doubted, Don Quixote proudly proclaims ‘I know
who I am’ (Cervantes, 1981: 46). By the end of the book, however, it is
clear, as Unamuno says, that ‘the rest of mankind scarcely know . . . who
they themselves are’, so easily do they slip into Don Quixote’s world
(Unamuno, 1967–70: III, 52). While Cervantes never gives us to under-
stand that his protagonist suffers any less for this accomplishment, it
does at least suggest that his actions are far from futile and, indeed, meet
with a certain kind of success.
In one of the most remarkable of these episodes, towards the end of
the second volume, Sancho is actually given an ‘island’ to govern by an
obliging duke who is so enchanted by Don Quixote that he helps him to
make good on his promise.19 The Duke does this in part because he
believes the spectacle of Sancho’s presumably inept government will be
endlessly entertaining. To everyone’s surprise, however, Sancho, govern-
ing in accord with what he has learned in his travels with Don Quixote,
proves an entirely capable and even wise ruler, both when presented with
problems staged by the Duke and when facing others that arise natu-
rally: ‘In a word, he made so many good rules that to this day they are
preserved there, and are called The ordinances of the great governor
Sancho Panza.’ The townspeople, having not been let in on the joke,
mourn Sancho’s resignation of the post and he ‘left them filled with
admiration’ (Cervantes, 1981: 712, 722).
Cervantes’ text incorporates so many levels of irony that it would

89
be dangerous to interpret this event too closely. But perhaps the follow-
ing will not be too outlandish: Don Quixote is constantly reminded
during his travels, by other characters, that the fantastic narratives from
which he draws his ideals (e.g. The Song of Roland, Amadis of Gaul)
are fictional. And Don Quixote, for believing in these fictional stories,
must be considered mad. But Sancho, we might say, in following Don
Quixote, follows something real. Sancho’s actions are based not on
fictional narratives but on the real-life example he has before him of one
who feels it his duty to right wrongs and act honorably at all costs. Thus
Cervantes can indicate, at one and the same time, the futility and the
success of Don Quixote’s actions: their futility in the failure of Don
Quixote’s many attempted ‘rescues’, and their success and worthiness
in their ability to inspire others – even if these others must also meet
with failure in the real world. Cervantes mocks the outlandish fictions
of the poets, but not necessarily the sentiments to which their efforts
give rise.
But is Don Quixote mad? In one remarkable episode, Quixote
reveals that he is quite self-conscious about the manner in which he has
embellished his Dulcinea, a woman whom he has never met, and who,
for him, embodies all the values of nobility, justice and beauty that he
holds dear (for he makes clear at various points that he loves her only
‘platonically’):
It is not to be supposed that all those poets who sang the praises of ladies
. . . had any such mistresses. . . . [T]hey only invent them for the most part
to furnish a subject for their verses. . . . So it suffices me to think and believe
that the good Aldonza Lorenzo [Dulcinea’s real name] is fair and virtu-
ous. . . . To put the whole thing in a nutshell, I persuade myself that all I
say is as I say, neither more nor less. (Cervantes, 1981: 184–5)
Don Quixote, then, is well aware that the world is not as he pretends
it to be. If he follows a fiction, it is as much from conviction as delu-
sion. But in choosing to believe that the world is a better place than it
actually is, he gives himself grounds for action that would otherwise
appear futile. It is only on the grounds of a certain kind of divine
madness, then, that Cervantes can countenance acting justly in a world
that takes no notice of good intentions. But in the example of Sancho’s
government, we learn that, for a time at least, this practice is not
entirely futile.
In the end though, Sancho’s government is overthrown by force
(staged by the Duke) and his own realization that the burdens of
governing do not repay the effort. The pessimistic outlook is thus
restored in the collapse of order and justice under threat of violence and
human indifference. But to say that Sancho’s government was ultimately
unsuccessful is hardly to say that it was not worth the effort. Though

90
the parable does not particularly give us hope for the future, it at least
shows us a worthwhile way of acting in a world that is otherwise devoid
of such examples. Sancho can claim, ‘I left the island as I found it, with
the same streets, houses, and roofs it had when I entered it’ (Cervantes,
1981: 733). In a pessimistic world, such resistance to the forces of decay
must be counted admirable. And if Sancho was successfully educated to
this resistance by Don Quixote’s fictions, may we not be similarly
educated by Cervantes?
To struggle to be remembered, even while knowing that it is imposs-
ible, is the fate of Quixote. But it is not a fate that depresses him; on the
contrary, he is far more invigorated than when he led an ordinary life
and had no more than ordinary hopes. Quixote finds a purpose that
allows him to act even in the face of his own mortality. In an episode
that Unamuno also found suggestive, Quixote comes across some peas-
ants carrying wooden statues of the saints. His reaction is to say: ‘These
saints and knights professed, even as I do, the calling of arms. The differ-
ence between us is that they were saints and fought divinely, while I am
a sinner and fight humanly’ (Cervantes, 1981: 743; see Unamuno,
1967–70: III, 358). Saints are assured of immortality; humans are not.
We suffer the disease of consciousness, as Unamuno would say, know-
ledge of our own impending death, without hope of cure. But we need
not be paralyzed by this any more than Quixote is paralyzed by his
status as a human and a sinner. In the ‘Curious Discourse Don Quixote
Delivered on Arms and Letters’, where even Cervantes’ narrator
concedes that he speaks sensibly, Quixote maintains the superiority of
the former to the latter, not for their effects, for both seek to bring about
justice and peace and succeed in equal portion, but only for the greater
suffering needed to acquire them: ‘whatever costs most is valued and
deserves to be valued most. . . . [And] for a man to come in the ordi-
nary course of things to be a good soldier costs him all the student
suffers, and in an incomparably higher degree, for at every step he runs
the risk of losing his life’ (Cervantes, 1981: 302). Quixote’s soldier, more
conscious of his mortality than most, suffers the most for his achieve-
ments. But to Unamuno’s pessimistic outlook, this is only to say that he
is more completely conscious of the costs of his action in a world that
is not designed to reward it. While the vileness of the modern world is
so contrary to his ethic that Don Quixote is ‘almost tempted to say that
in my heart I repent of having adopted this profession of knight-errant
in so detestable an age’, in the end, he does not so repent, but rather
takes up a cause of his own creation which he knows will lead only to
suffering and failure (Cervantes, 1981: 303). No salvation is promised
him; yet he acts.
He acts knowing well the terrible truths about life, knowing the
contradictions of time that await him like immovable windmills on the

91
landscape. He acts because, so long as he does, his purpose can unite
past, present and future into a temporary unit that holds the demons of
time at bay. So long as he acts, the past is not lost, for it lives on in him,
and the future is not a burden, for he chooses it. That the windmills will
sweep away horse and rider, shatter his weapon, and survive all this
unchanged does not much matter. This is the grain of wisdom in
Quixote’s madness.
Though it is a sobering outlook, then, pessimism is not necessarily
a depressing one. In Don Quixote, Cervantes describes a figure who
continues to find reasons to act in a disenchanted and downcast world.
Quixote’s ethic of personal conduct is appropriate for those with a
pessimistic outlook. It acknowledges the fundamentally tragic character
of human existence without finding such knowledge paralyzing. Don
Quixote is often read as a picaresque farce, but Schopenhauer’s charac-
terization of life seems to strike closer to the mark: ‘The life of every
individual, viewed as a whole and in general . . . is really a tragedy; but
gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy’ (Schopenhauer,
1958: I, 332).
Conclusion
Pessimism expects nothing. That is, it has no expectations of success, no
theoretical guarantees of progress. This is not a disfaith in humanity but
a modesty of purpose born of the knowledge that all humans struggle
with and against time and that all, ultimately, lose that struggle.
Pessimism countenances action only upon the acknowledgment of these
conditions. The common element in the pessimistic philosophers is the
priority they give to the burden of time. As I have argued, this burden
seems, if anything, to have increased in our era, with the collapse of the
faith in progress and the ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ of which
postmodernism speaks. What I have been most concerned to do in this
paper is to refute two related ideas: first, that such pessimism must arise
from an emotional condition, and second, that it must result in an
emotional condition. That is, I have sought to deny that pessimism only
derives from or leads to a posture of resignation. Instead, through the
figure of Don Quixote and the broader outlook of Cervantes, we find
that the pessimistic spirit can create a mandate to act in consciousness
of, but in rebellion against, the burden of time. If Quixote has no
grounds for hope, he at least has grounds for self-respect. No more than
this seems to be available to the pessimist. But this at least ought to
suggest that pessimism has a positive offering to make and must not be
dismissed out of hand.

92
Pessimism expects nothing then, but this is not nihilism. Nihilism
would be not wanting anything. Extreme nihilism? Wanting nothing.
University of Virginia, Department of Government and Foreign

Affairs, Charlottesville, VA, USA
PSC
Notes
I thank Jennifer Mnookin, Sara Monoson and Andrew Norris for their helpful
comments and suggestions on various drafts of this paper. The University of
Virginia and Northwestern University provided financial and material support
(respectively) that enabled me to complete the paper in a timely fashion. I am
grateful also to the students of my graduate seminar who endured my inchoate
thoughts about pessimism. An early version of this paper was presented at the
American Political Science Association meeting of 1996.
1 The popular media often discuss pessimism as if it were a dangerous and

communicable disorder within our society that must be checked, lest it
infect our leaders or our children. Many instances could be cited, but think
of the reaction to President Clinton’s offhand remark that the American
public was in a ‘funk’.
2 Not to prejudge the highly various philosophies that their names evoke, but
simply to give the reader a broader idea of what I have in mind, I might say
that the first group could also include figures like Montaigne and Leopardi,
the second, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and the third, Ortega y Gasset and
Camus.
3 Koselleck (1985: 276–88).
4 For the tenacious hold which the idea of progress has had specifically on
the American mind, see, e.g., Chambers (1958).
5 Whether this must be a matter of persistent decline is a question which, for
the moment, I will leave open, but it seems to me quite dubious. As one
commentator has put it in another context, ‘it would be bad enough to have
no prospects for improvement beyond the conditions which pertained’ if
those conditions were felt to be sufficiently awful and to stretch infinitely
into the future (Schouls, 1994). This, as we shall see below, was the position
of Schopenhauer, who is generally taken to typify pessimism; he postulated
no decline but merely the continuation of an unhappy condition without
prospect for improvement. I should say here as well that the issue of the
‘shape’ of time is considerably more complex than this binary opposition,
but for the purposes of this paper, I make use of this commonplace under-
standing.
6 Try, if you will, to find the words ‘pessimist’ or ‘pessimism’ used as a compli-
ment in the popular media; almost invariably these words are used as terms
of abuse.

93
7 Scholarly appreciation for pessimism as a philosophy was largely confined
to the last quarter of the 19th century when Schopenhauer’s wide influence
was, if commonly deplored, at least recognized for a time as deriving from
something other than the moodiness of his readers. See Dale (1989: Ch. 9),
for a survey of the English literature in this vein as well as a fascinating
argument about the relation of pessimism to Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
8 See, for example, R. J. Hollingdale’s introduction to his edition of Schopen-
hauer’s later writings, Essays and Aphorisms (1970: 22–34). See also Navia
(1971) and Cauchi (1991). A prominent social theorist recently summar-
ized this view for me with the quip ‘Optimism is a theory; pessimism is a
disposition’. Schouls (1994) recognizes this problem and, happily, avoids it.
9 This is the attitude taken, for example, by Georg Simmel (1991: Ch. 4).
Simmel treats Schopenhauer’s actual arguments for pessimism, for the most
part, with contempt, concluding ‘that the decision for optimism or
pessimism is based . . . on a specific reaction of the soul that transcends the
empirical realm’ (1991: 65).
10 While Rousseau has readily been called such, e.g. the ‘patriarch of
pessimism’ by Unamuno’s translator (Unamuno, 1967–70: III, xxxiii),
without the thought that this was a controversial claim, not all have agreed
with this assessment. Schopenhauer found in Rousseau a principal antagon-
ist and accused him of serving ‘the interests of optimism’ (Schopenhauer,
1958: II, 585).
11 I am not arguing that Rousseau’s pessimism remains wholly uncontroverted
by other elements of his philosophy, simply that we have here the articu-
lation of a coherent, reasoned (rather than emotional) pessimism which
forms a basic element in his orientation. Of course The Social Contract has
often been depicted by commentators as a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ laid
out in the Second Discourse. While I find that conclusion far from convin-
cing and would take issue with it were I attempting to present a compre-
hensive interpretation of Rousseau, that is not my purpose here. I attempt
only to trace the sources of Rousseau’s pessimism and to compare it with
other varieties.
12 Starobinski touches on this point when he writes that Rousseau ‘recoils in
horror from the danger, but also from the fecundity, of temporal existence’
(1971: 302).
13 Starobinski claims that in the Second Discourse, Rousseau ‘repeats the
Scripture that [he] replaces in another tongue. . . . Christian theology,
though not present explicitly, shapes the structure of Rousseau’s argument’
(Starobinski, 1971: 290). While this gloss is true in one sense, its emphasis
is misplaced. The substitution of secular for theological language, rather
than simply being an attempt to reach old conclusions by new means, may
well represent, instead, an attempt to displace religious reasoning, to
demonstrate just how unnecessary it is for reaching many accepted
judgments and then to show, as well, how a secular approach opens up new
vistas.
14 It has been objected that Schopenhauer here simply makes the unwarranted
assumption that value = permanence (see Clarke, 1970: 196 ff.). But it
would be better to say rather that he believes we cannot derive benefit from

94
that which is past, since it no longer exists – still an extreme position, but
hardly a senseless one. It should be pointed out here as well that Schopen-
hauer’s argument is not about the absence of values, but about the inability
of human existence to sustain them.
15 It is true that Schopenhauer devotes considerable attention to the capacity
of art to transport us, as it were, out of time and towards a better under-
standing of this realm. But, as repeated comparisons to Indian asceticism
make clear, this practice results, not in euphoria, but in a partial release
from our sufferings, which is best called a sense of nothingness. And, in any
case, the release is always brief and incomplete. It serves to edify us but
hardly alters the overall cost–benefit calculation by which Schopenhauer
finds life as a whole wanting.
16 I quote a little more liberally in this segment of the paper on the assump-
tion that most readers will be largely unfamiliar with Unamuno.
17 Both Schopenhauer and Unamuno discuss suicide at length. But though
each professes to understand the impulse, neither recommends this course
of action.
18 Cervantes, 1981: 825–9. One suspects that Don Quixote’s ‘return to his
senses’ and to his Christian beliefs takes place in part to placate the Church
censors who had to approve all publications in Spain at the time that the
second volume of Don Quixote appeared. Certainly little in the book
prepares one for this death-bed conversion – and it would severely deform
the narrative did not Cervantes put it to an inventive use, namely, as yet
another way to reinforce how completely Quixote has won over his
companions to his way of life.
19 Cervantes, 1981: 661 ff. Actually, the ‘island’ is a town near the Duke’s
castle. But the Duke refers to it as an island, and has his men do the same,
and Sancho, no great master of the principles of geography, does not notice
anything amiss.
PSC
References
Cauchi, F. (1991) ‘Nietzsche and Pessimism’, History of European Ideas 13:
253–67.
Cervantes, M. (1981) The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Chambers, C. (1958) ‘The Belief in Progress in Twentieth-Century America’,
Journal of the History of Ideas 19: 197–224.
Clarke, J. J. (1970) ‘Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: A Study in the Logic of Pessimism’,
Philosophy 45.
Dale, P. A. (1989) In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in
the Victorian Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Koselleck, R. (1985) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Navia, L. (1971) ‘Reflections on Schopenhauer’s Pessimism’, Journal of Critical
Analysis 3: 136–47.

95
Rousseau, J.-J. (1986) The First and Second Discourses and Essay on the Origin
of Languages. New York: Harper & Row.
Schopenhauer, A. (1958) The World as Will and Representation. New York:
Dover Publications.
Schopenhauer, A. (1970) Essays and Aphorisms. New York: Penguin.
Schopenhauer, A. (1994) Philosophical Writings. New York: Continuum.
Schouls, P. (1994) ‘John Locke: Optimist or Pessimist?’, British Journal for the
History of Philosophy 2: 51–73.
Simmel, G. (1991) Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Illinois
Press.
Starobinski, J. (1971) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Unamuno, M. (1967–70) Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.

Joshua Foa Dienstag - The Pessimistic Spirit

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Joshua Foa Dienstag - The Pessimistic Spirit

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Philosophy & Social Criticism

The pessimistic spirit

The online version of this article can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

>> Version of Record - Jan 1, 1999

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

The pessimistic spirit

Abstract Pessimism today is poorly understood. Indeed, such is the

Key words Miguel de Cervantes · Don Quixote · history · nihilism ·

The philosophers . . . always have this dilemma in their mouths to console

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 25 no 1 • pp. 71–95

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

The cultural pessimism of Rousseau

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

The metaphysical pessimism of Schopenhauer

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Everything is powerfully intensified by thinking about absent and future

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

The tragic pessimism of Unamuno

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

It is not that pessimism forces us to give up happiness; we are unlikely

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

University of Virginia, Department of Government and Foreign

1 The popular media often discuss pessimism as if it were a dangerous and

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at St Petersburg State University on January 4, 2014

You might also like