Pessimism and its reasons: Schopenhauer as a case study and methodological directions

Abstract

Our aim is to take Schopenhauer's thinking as a case study and starting point to discuss the extent to which “pessimism” can be grounded and reinterpreted according to “objective reasons”, conceptually philosophical. For interpreters like Christopher Janaway and Frederick Beiser, the philosophical legitimacy of Schopenhauerian pessimism, attributed to the thesis that life is a business that does not cover investment costs, is guaranteed by the implications inferred from the metaphysics of the Will. On the other hand, Kuno Fischer, accompanied among others by Bryan Magee, reinterprets such pessimism from “subjective reasons”, based on certain dispositions of spirit or preferences, such as Schopenhauer's conflicting relationship with his mother, for example. The difficulty in determining more precisely the basis for Schopenhauer's pessimism is redoubled if we consider studies that follow an opposite trend and that classify this author as an “optimist”; Heinz Gerd Ingenkamp can be appointed as a representative of this interpretative line. If such a difficulty is due, as we suppose at first, to the inevitable anachronism that permeates most of the discussions about Schopenhauer's supposed pessimism about the value of existence, we propose to minimize it by means of an exegetical procedure that we indicate here in general lines.