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Notes
See Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006, 3–45) for a more comprehensive discussion of the various beliefs and philosophies associated with pessimism.
For examples of this objection, see (Hume 1962, 64–65), Benatar (2006, 211–212), Edwards (2008, 129), Ligotti (2018, 33), and Smuts (2020, 146). See also Beiser (2018, 44, 62, 165) for discussions of how it was raised in the nineteenth century against German pessimists such as Schopenhauer, Bahnsen, Hartmann, and Mainländer.
Derek Parfit is usually credited with devising this taxonomy. See Parfit (1984, 493–502).
For an example, see Benatar (2006, 81–86). To my knowledge, Richard Taylor never explicitly endorses the claim that life is not worth living. However, his arguments for life’s meaninglessness are often cited as exemplifying existential pessimism. See Taylor (2008, 134–142). See also Beiser (2018, 4–5) for discussion of these two varieties of pessimism can be found among nineteenth-century German pessimists.
For examples, see Landau (2017, 93–99) and Smuts (2020, 81).
Similar observations can be found in other pessimists—that suicide does not solve but capitulates to the ills that prompt pessimists to declare life not worth living. See Cioran (2013, 32) and Schopenhauer (181, 183).
There is an Epicurean counterargument to this view—namely, that death cannot inflict any losses on the beings it annihilates because (1) one cannot be harmed by death while one is alive and (2) one cannot suffer any harms/losses once one ceases to be. See Benatar (2017, 110–127) for a pessimistic response to this counterargument.
For one example, see Nietzsche (1956, 108–109).
This idea is so common among pessimists it is difficult isolate specific instances for citation purposes. For examples, see Schopenhauer (10–11, 304–306), Cioran (140), Benatar (2006, 64–69), and Ligotti (27).
See Etcoff (1999) for this type of argument.
Tolstoy notes that he had already published War and Peace and Anna Karenina when he became convinced of life’s meaninglessness. He was already regarded as one of the greatest writers in Western literature. Yet these accomplishments had not insulated from despair over his life’s meaninglessness (Tolstoy, 1987, 29).
Tolstoy discusses in Chapter Three of A Confession how marriage and parenthood enabled him to temporarily set aside his anxieties (Tolstoy 1987, 28). However, this relief proved to be short-lived.
Hume is the locus classicus for this argument. He states in “Of the Original Contract” that it is hypocritical to claim that “a poor peasant” should simply leave their country if they object to its laws: “We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master, though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves her” (Hume 1948; 356, 363).
Here, I would reemphasize that I wish to remain agnostic on suicide’s morality. My remarks in § may make it seem as though I support assisted suicide in a broad range of cases. A critic might wish to challenge my defense of pessimism by identifying problems in such a permissive stance. However, my claim is not that pessimists should be allowed to avail themselves of assisted suicide, only that its impermissibility provides them with an excuse for not attempting suicide. To be clear, there may be good reasons for prohibiting assisted suicide, or only allowing it in a limited range of cases, such as physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.
A critic could object that there are states within the United States that allow some forms of physician-assisted suicide; thus, individuals can request and legally receive assistance in taking their lives. However, physician-assisted suicide is restricted in these cases to individuals with short-term terminal medical conditions. For this reason, I am skeptical of whether it can be said that individuals can request and legally receive assistance in committing suicide. Instead, physician-assisted dying seems to be restricted to cases in which individuals would rather live, where they are not necessarily suicidal, but where their medical conditions make it impossible for them to live much longer—cases where it is regarded as better to allow them die sooner, perhaps less painfully and with greater dignity, should they choose it for themselves.
See, for example, Kant (1995, 13–14). It is possible for a pessimist to defend something like this view—that suicide violates commitments one has to oneself. (Examples can be found, arguably, in Bahnsen’s and Camus’s writings.) For my purposes, however, I find it useful to focus on Aristotle’s account as it is clearer how it lends itself to the argument that pessimists can find life not worth living yet regard themselves as morally prohibited from committing suicide.
It is worth stressing the caveat in this sentence—that suicide may be unethical in some cases because it harms others. This argument entails that suicide is only provisionally unethical; it is unethical if someone has relationships to others who will be wrongfully harmed by committing suicide. Given that loneliness is one of the primary reasons for contemplating suicide, it could be argued that this consideration may not apply to many cases of suicide.
That pessimists can have such responsibilities is illustrated by a critique Benatar considers in The Human Predicament. Benatar discusses whether pessimists have a duty to remain silent about life’s worthlessness. If life is as bad as they say, and if humans have evolved coping mechanisms that blind them to its horrors, would it not be cruel to deprive them of this solace? Benatar rejects this argument (Benatar 2017, 9–12). However, its coherency implies that pessimist can consistently uphold pessimism yet recognize themselves as obligated to forgo certain expressions of it out of concern for others.
I would suggest that some of literature’s greatest pessimists exhibit this type of personality. So, for example, Ivan Karamazov (Brothers Karamazov) and Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities) espouse pessimistic worldviews. However, there are hints that their pessimism flows from their inability to abandon certain ethical hopes—the resentment they feel toward the world and their existences for being so inimical to love, kindness, and selflessness.
Benatar makes a similar observation. See Benatar (2017, 211).
Schopenhauer’s reasons for rejecting suicide are more complex than this sentence might seem to imply. Schopenhauer discourages suicide because he regards it as insufficiently life-denying, a distorted expression of the will to live, whereas he regards ascetism a superior type of life-denial. Nevertheless, I would cite his ethics as an illustration of how a pessimist can consistently reject suicide in favor of a care-based ethics. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer at this journal for helping me to clarify this point.
Camus is the most famous example of this type of pessimism. Others would be Miguel de Unamuno, Joshua Foa Dienstag, and William R. Brashear. The label “heroic pessimism” comes from Ligotti (2018, 31–33, 171).
Smuts uses this example. He concludes his remarks on matter-of-fact pessimism by quoting a jab Nietzsche makes against Schopenhauer: “Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really—played the flute. Every day, after dinner” (Smuts 2020, 146).
This flaw is well-documented but, to be safe, here is an example. Suppose an ethics professor has published groundbreaking articles on the immorality of sexual harassment. Suppose too that he is discovered to have sexually harassed a colleague. His behavior might expose him as a fraud but it would not prove that his theses about harassment’s immorality must be false. Similarly, that a pessimist, such as Schopenhauer, enjoyed his life would only show that he was hypocritical, not that his arguments were unsound.
See Beiser (2018, 222–223) for more on Mainländer’s beliefs concerning suicide.
See Benatar (2017, 163–199).
Susan Neiman makes a similar criticism of pessimism—see Neiman (2010).
It is worth noting that Mainländer did not advocate for suicide in his philosophic writings. An anonymous reviewer helpfully points out that he advocated for celibacy and a type of socialism. Though he committed suicide, it is not clear that it should be understood as an expression of his philosophic beliefs.
This ambiguity underscores the problems with the suicide objection. I noted earlier that the objection can seem like an argumentum ad hominem, but a strange one as it accuses pessimists of being hypocritical for failing to uphold beliefs that few actually espoused. Arguably, that there have been so few suicidal pessimists should be interpreted in the opposite way—as evidence of their integrity. Alternatively, Mainländer is sometimes cited as the rare example of a consistent pessimist, someone who was willing to uphold his philosophy’s implications. Yet there is a case to be made that his suicide should be interpreted in the opposite way—as a betrayal of his philosophy.
Here I would reiterate the warnings I gave in footnote #1. There is a danger in writing about suicide of trivializing it. I certainly do not wish to ignore or make light of mental health disorders that lead to suicidal ideation. However, there is also a danger of pathologizing suicide—assuming that anyone who considers it must have a mental illness.
I worry that the suicide objection reinforces this second tendency. Though presented as a critique of pessimism, it frames suicide in such as way as to depict it as fundamentally irrational—something no individual ever does based on a well-founded belief that life is not worth living. Against this, I claim that at least some individuals who have committed suicide have done so based on such a belief—that, for all intents and purposes, they were pessimists. They simply did not assign themselves this label in the arbitrarily restricted set of texts that critics fixate on in framing their objection.
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Shaw, J. Must Pessimists Be Suicidal?. J Value Inquiry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09880-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09880-4