Weltschmerz and the World

Ian James Kidd takes a realistic and global view of the history of pessimism.

- Ian James Kidd

The most famous pessimist in the history of philosophy is surely Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

In his most important work, The World as Will and Representation (1818) he describes our existence as 'a mistake' and 'the worst of all possible worlds', explaining that, except in occasional moments of artistic delight, humans are trapped in an endless painful cycle of desire, frustration, and boredom. For Schopenhauer, “pain, not pleasure, is the positive thing, pleasure being merely its absence” and life, if properly understood, “ought to disgust us”. Alongside suffering and distraction, our overall moral condition is also terrible: other than a few 'beautiful souls', people are dominated by “vices, failings... of all sorts”, and the social world is a “den of thieves”. Suicide is morally ruled out, so our only path to redemption is to try, however futilely, to transcend the will that relentlessly drives all things. True to his pessimism, though, this transcendence is confined by Schopenhauer to an elite group – to 'saints and geniuses' - condemning the rest of us to the hell of human existence. While Schopenhauer is the most famous pessimist, he was not the only pessimist in nineteenth century Germany, nor was he considered the most important at the time. Excellent recent studies of the history of pessimism - such as Frederick Beiser’s Weltschmerz ('World-pain', 2016) - challenge the Schopenhauer-centred picture, reminding us of other, now-forgotten figures.