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Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: A Study in the Logic of Pessimism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

J. J. Clarke
J. J. Clarke
Affiliation:
University of Singapore
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Extract

In this paper I shall deal with a new form of Optimism. Rationalists once believed that it was mistaken to suppose that a world without God is a meaningless one; material progress along with the improvement of men and their institutions, indefinitely protracted, ensured that life was meaningful. More recently it has become fashionable to claim that the pessimist, the cosmic mourner, is not mistaken at all, but rather incoherent. It is not that there is no answer to his question but rather that no sensible question has been asked—at least in the terms in which he poses it. The latter qualification is necessary, for no one is denying that people's lives may either possess or lack meaning. Rather what is being denied is that life as a whole, tout court and without limitation, can be said either to have or not to have sense. One cannot, it is argued, regret what could not, logically, be otherwise, and since nothing could possibly count as endowing the cosmos as a whole with meaning it is not logically possible for the cosmos as a whole to have, or not to have, meaning. The regret evinced by the pessimist becomes, therefore, a pseudo-regret. ‘… it is perverse writes Ayer, ‘to see tragedy in what could not conceivably be otherwise.’ Just as a pseudo-problem is one for which there could, logically, be no solution, so a pseudo-regret is one in which there can be no assuagement of the regretted situation. None of this is to deny, of course, that a man can experience a state of mind which might be described as ‘cosmic anguish’, but such an experience has no cognitive value: it is a state of mind, no doubt painful for the possessor, which tells us nothing about the world beyond it. That people have confused this state of mind with a judgement about the world is understandable, but mistaken.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 45 , Issue 173 , July 1970 , pp. 193 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1970

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References

1 The Problems of Knowledge, London, 1956, p. 41.Google Scholar See also his Language, Truth and Logic, London, 1946, p. 35Google Scholar, and his essay, “The Claims of Philosophy”. The same view is expressed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus 6.5, 6.51 and 6.521, and at various places in the Notebooks. See also Antony Flew's article on Tolstoi's Confessions in Ethics, Vol. LXXIII, and ch. V of his book God and Philosophy, London, 1966.Google Scholar A similar thought can be found in Kant's view that there are certain logical limitations on what can be willed.

2 “Concerning the Vanity of Existence” quoted from Jekyll's translation in The Wisdom of Schopenhauer, London, 1911, pp. 322–3.Google Scholar

3 The World as Will and Idea, tr. Haldane, and Kemp, , London, 1883, Vol. III, p. 383Google Scholar

4 The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, p. 467.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., p. 507.

6 Many who have attempted to describe the experience in question have fully recognized that they are bumping up against the limits of language, See St. Augustine's Confessions, ch. XIII. In Burnt Norton T. S. Eliot refers to this problem when he says “Worlds strain/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden”.

7 The experience is explicitly related to the hearing of music in Section V of Burnt Norton and Section V of The Dry Salvages.

8 From the chapter, “By the Ocean of Time”, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter.

9 Quoted from Zaehner, R. C.: Mysticism Sacred and Profane, Oxford, 1957, p. 47.Google Scholar

10 See Chung-yuan, Chang: Creativity and Taoism, New York, 1963, ch. V.Google Scholar

11 (a) Plotinus, quoted from Ducasse, C. J.: A Philosophical Scrutiny of Religion, New York, 1953, p. 283.Google Scholar (b) Vivekenanda, quoted from James, William: The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans Green & Co., p. 392.Google Scholar (c) Meister Eckhart, quoted from Otto, Rudolph: Mysticism East and West, New York, 1952, p. 59.Google Scholar (d) From the Chhandogya-Upanishad, quoted from Otto, , op. cit., pp. 57–8.Google Scholar (e) John Custance, quoted from Zaehner, R. C., op. cit., p. 93.Google Scholar (f) Tennyson, quoted from Zaehaner, R. C., op. cit., p. 36.Google Scholar

12 World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, p. 362.Google Scholar

13 Quoted from Merton, Thomas: Mystic's and Zen Masters, New York, 1967, p. 284.Google Scholar

14 Op. cit., p. 38f.

15 See Otto, Rudolph, op. cit., pp. 210–11.Google Scholar