Worse than the best possible pessimism? Olga Plümacher's critique of Schopenhauer

ABSTRACT

Olga Plümacher (1839–1895) published a book entitled Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in 1884. It was an influential book: Nietzsche owned a copy, and there are clear cases where he borrowed phraseology from Plümacher. Plümacher specifies philosophical pessimism as comprising two propositions: ‘The sum of displeasure outweighs the sum of pleasure’ and ‘Consequently the non-being of the world would be better than its being’. Plümacher cites Schopenhauer as the first proponent of this position, and Eduard von Hartmann as the thinker who has developed it to its fullest potential. She heavily criticizes Schopenhauer in many respects, not for being a pessimist, but rather for not achieving as good a pessimism as he might have done, on the following major grounds: that his account of pleasure as merely privative is implausible, that he has a confused account of individuation, that his retention of a Christian notion of guilt is gratuitous, that he lapses into the self-pitying subjectivity of the condition she calls Weltschmerz, and that his philosophy leads to quietism, and is thus inferior to von Hartmann’s combination of pessimism and optimism, which allows for social progress.

KEYWORDS:

• Pessimism
• Plümacher
• Schopenhauer
• Nietzsche
• von Hartmann

1. Introduction

Olga Plümacher, née Hünerwadel, was born in Russia in 1839 to Swiss and Prussian parents, and died in 1895 in Beersheba Springs, Tennessee. Plümacher was without formal philosophical education, but was intellectually adventurous and achieved a significant philosophical presence as a self-taught thinker. She influenced the writer Frank Wedekind, as his so- called ‘philosophical aunt’, and published (under the gender-neutral ‘O. Plümacher’) three books: Der Kampf um's Unbewusste (1881), Zwei Individualisten der Schopenhauer'schen Schule (1881), and Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1884, reprinted 1888¹). She also published articles, including one in English entitled ‘Pessimism’ in the fourth edition of the journal Mind.²

Here, I discuss Plümacher's Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Pessimism in Past and Present), in which she sets herself a threefold task. First, she surveys the wider strands that have fed into pessimism, including Indian philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, scientific scepticism, and the outlook of Weltschmerz, or world-weariness³ found especially in poetry and popular culture. Secondly, she gives an analytical account of philosophical pessimism, which, as she says in her Introduction, was “first presented as an indispensable organic part of a complete philosophical system by Arthur Schopenhauer, and which has Eduard von Hartmann as its most prominent present advocate”.⁴ She also includes Julius Bahnsen and Phillip Mainländer as philosophical pessimists, and mentions a few other contemporaries.⁵ But philosophical pessimism for her culminates in the work of Hartmann, and it is from this standpoint that she criticizes Schopenhauer.⁶ Although some passages in her book are derivative from Hartmann, she presents her critique with a succinctness Hartmann was unable to achieve and paints a more vivid picture. Thirdly, Plümacher catalogues the antagonistic reaction to pessimism in the learned world of her day, and the defence taken up by Hartmann and his partisans. This part of the book is a valuable record of an all but forgotten episode in intellectual history, and in Frederick Beiser's words mounts a ‘solid and lucid’ response to pessimism's opponents.⁷ Beiser says little concerning Plümacher's attitude to Schopenhauer, concentrating instead on her account of the contemporary Pessimismusstreit, of which he rates her the ‘great historian’.⁸ By contrast, I shall concentrate on her criticisms of Schopenhauer, not for being a pessimist; rather, for not achieving as good a pessimism as he might have done. One further aspect of note is the influence that the Pessimismus book had on Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche owned a copy of the 1884 edition, which is ‘annotated throughout’ by him,⁹ and we shall note some interesting cases where passages in his works parallel Plümacher.

What I intend to show is as follows: (1) that Plümacher displays originality and insight in her analysis of Schopenhauer, in particular in distinguishing the claims of philosophical pessimism from the attitude of Weltschmerz; (2) that Plümacher makes highly pertinent criticisms of Schopenhauer's system of thought that have independently become familiar since her time; (3) that Nietzsche used some of her ideas, or at the very least her phraseology, without acknowledgement at prominent points in his later writings; (4) that Plümacher wishes to defend a version of philosophical pessimism that is free of Weltschmerz and of the inconsistencies of Schopenhauer, but that in doing so she is largely derivative from Hartmann's account of pessimism, and in the end unpersuasive because of the implausibility of Hartmann's account.

2. Schopenhauer and Weltschmerz

Plümacher's account of Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism places it in contrast with the condition known as Weltschmerz. The latter is a self-centred attitude of lament about the world and one's uneasy place within it, whose most distinguished expressions are literary and poetic. She is insistent that Weltschmerz is different from philosophical pessimism, and is not really philosophy at all,¹⁰ because, as she says in her article in Mind, philosophical pessimism is “uninfluenced by subjective feelings, rests exclusively on objective observation, and counts individual sensation as an object among other objects”.¹¹ Plümacher is disparaging of Weltschmerz: it is “lyrical-poetic and not philosophical” because it “posits one's own I as centre of the world and laments it as such, or feels its torment as the world's torment”. For philosophy, by contrast, “one's own I is just one object among other objects; philosophy leads out from the I, while lyrical poetry concentrates everything into the subject of sensation as the poetic mirror of the world” (Pessimismus, 5). She classes Weltschmerz as a “sickness of youth” (107), an immature stage of self-preoccupation that is ideally to be outgrown. It is also a historically bounded condition:

The period of Weltschmerz begins in the last decade of the previous century and lasts until the present, while the typical literary monuments produced by Weltschmerz fall in the 20s to the 50s of our century. In its various stages, Weltschmerz is a reaction against the rationalist Enlightenment philosophy of the eighteenth century, against Kant's ethical rigorism, and Fichte's abstract idealism. It is the consciousness that neither enlightenment in matters of religion, nor the advances of science, nor their application to ordinary life, nor moderate advances towards a more favourable political order, can make us happy … . Weltschmerz is also the consciousness that, however much the world is altered inwardly and outwardly, it still remains the same ‘earthly vale of sorrow’ as in the [Christian] dogma that has been discarded as irrational, only it is now somewhat more darkly overshadowed because the rainbow of hope for a beyond no longer arches above it. Finally, Weltschmerz is the consciousness that virtue and happiness … are not proportionate to one another.

(106)

In her descriptions of Weltschmerz as a distinctively modern condition, Plümacher at times sounds (for today's reader) reminiscent of Nietzsche. See, for example, On the Genealogy of Morality II: 6–7, where Nietzsche contrasts a past relish for cruelty with modern softness. But we should rather say that Nietzsche is reminiscent of Plümacher, who writes:

The bearer of Weltschmerz is the offspring of generations whose struggle for existence was conducted predominantly with weapons of the intellect; he is alienated in the highest degree from nature in concreto, although in abstracto he often insists with pathos that he belongs to it, and feels this alienation painfully, despite the fact that he would no longer be able to tolerate the opposite situation. … A modern human being who possesses the intellectual and mental qualities requisite for Weltschmerz finds the mere representation of certain things and events sufficient to disturb his comfort. Things and events that did not diminish the feeling of well-being in his ancient and medieval ancestors even when they were there in reality before their very eyes, but which, quite the contrary, were regarded as enhancements of pleasure in contrast with one's own condition. Thus, for example, it would be a spice of heavenly blissfulness to look through a peep-hole from time to time and see the damned roasting in hell; in many castles the trap-door into the dungeon was in or immediately adjacent to the ballroom; the auto-da-fé was a component of Spanish royal weddings.

(101–2)

Page 102 of Plümacher's first edition is one of the pages Nietzsche marked.¹² In the Genealogy, he writes:

It is repugnant to the delicacy … of tame domestic animals (which is to say modern humans, which is to say us) to imagine in all its force the degree to which cruelty constitutes the great festival joy of earlier humanity … . [I]t has not been long since one could not imagine royal marriages and folk festivals without executions, torturings, or perhaps an auto-da-fé, likewise no noble household without beings on whom one could vent one's malice and cruel teasing without a second thought.

(Genealogy II: 6)¹³

The detailed similarity here is too strong to be coincidental, though Nietzsche follows his usual practice and gives no acknowledgement.

For Plümacher the person of Weltschmerz is a product of the modern European world, over-sensitive, over-compassionate – Plümacher diagnoses in the Weltschmerzler, and in Schopenhauer, “a soft heart for the sufferings of the animal world and of less intellectually endowed humans from distant places and times” (129) – and self-obsessed: “annoyance with the world is combined with contented immersion in one's own interior, where the man of Weltschmerz, aided by his recognition of the deficiencies of the world and of his time, catches sight of something higher” (103). The world's sufferings are “indispensable for the sake of the pleasure gained from a self-concerned rummaging in one's own ‘torn heart’” (104). The Weltschmerzler is internally conflicted: he “feels his reflection on the world's misery, which he feels as his own suffering, and his compassion for his own soul with its wealth of feeling and cognition, as a kind of pleasure”, yet becomes conscious that the displeasure the world inflicts on him always threatens to outweigh this pleasure. “And yet pleasure is there, if frequently not acknowledged; and when it itself becomes the object of reflection in turn, there arises self-irony” (103–4). There is a kind of gratification in being miserable about the world, and a self-aestheticization that finds this very inner tension fascinating.

Weltschmerz does not constitute a philosophical position, and does not arise out of one. Rather, it is the other way round. In Schopenhauer's case Weltschmerz is the chief motive for engaging in philosophy: he produces a metaphysics out of the conviction that life is by nature full of suffering, and that there is a discrepancy between what human beings will and what generally happens to them (124). But in producing that metaphysics he transcends Weltschmerz, shifting from self-centred and self-gratifying complaint about the world to an account of the metaphysical ground of the human condition. He “embraces all the data of Weltschmerz, but for him the world's misery is no longer an unsolved puzzle, as it was for the proponent of Weltschmerz” (127). His metaphysics of the will provides a solution to the puzzle, and this, for Plümacher, makes him a philosophical pessimist – and indeed the first of his kind.

Nonetheless, Schopenhauer is still detrimentally influenced by Weltschmerz, according to Plümacher. The above-mentioned ‘soft heart’ for all suffering creatures is one example. She gives another in a particularly vivid passage:

Schopenhauer's sensibility is entirely that of the man of Weltschmerz. He has a titanic feeling of self [ein titanisches Selbstgefühl], … It also leads him to a lofty glorification of the genius in contrast with ‘nature's mass products’.

This strong genial feeling of the I is just a specific application of a strong feeling of individuality. Hence also the lament — not pessimistic, but truly characteristic of Weltschmerz — over earthly transitoriness and the lively emphasis on death as the first and highest of all ills.

(129)

According to Schopenhauer's metaphysics, individuality is supposed to be ‘merely phenomenal’, while in reality there is ultimately the non-individuated thing in itself. Schopenhauer states: “at bottom every individuality is only a special error, a misstep, something that would be better off not being, and in fact the true purpose of life is to retrieve us from it” (WWR 2: 508).¹⁴ Yet the marvellous phrase ‘titanisches Selbstgefühl’ captures an undeniable aspect of Schopenhauer's authorial persona that stands in tension with his metaphysics and tends to valorize his own individuality. He explains at length the vast distance between individuals of great intellect and run-of-the-mill humanity, and becomes embarrassingly self-regarding when arguing that being neglected in one's own day is a proof of greatness.

However, as regards Schopenhauer's philosophical position, this admitted tension is possibly less stark than Plümacher implies. First, Schopenhauer's view that we need to be retrieved from our identification with individuality rests on its being the natural default position for any human being. Only a radical cognitive transformation, a transition into a state of ‘total will-lessness’ will stop anyone from identifying the self as simply the individual human being: for each of us naturally

sits calmly in a world full of sorrow, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis … . [H]is vanishing little person, his unextended present, his momentary comfort, these alone have reality for him: and he does everything he can to maintain these as long as a more adequate cognition does not open his eyes.

(WWR 1: 379)

Schopenhauer's reply to Plümacher could be that in this respect he is just like everyone else. Everyone would be better off if they could view the world in the way his metaphysics dictates, but the default position of identification with the individual is extremely difficult for anyone, himself included, to overcome. Still, Plümacher's rather pertinent point is that Schopenhauer's works give little evidence of his regarding the human individual Arthur Schopenhauer as a ‘vanishing little person’, or of ever wanting to.

Secondly, Schopenhauer does not depict the individual's death as “the first and highest of all ills”. Rather, he calls death “the great opportunity not to be I any longer” (WWR 2, 524), and says one should tell a dying person, “you are ceasing to be something that it would have been better for you never to have become” (WWR 2, 517). He emphasizes that our own death is something we naturally fear as the greatest loss, but thinks we do so without good reason, and only because the non-rational will to life (our essence) disposes us to cling to life as though it were a good. In Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2 Schopenhauer has a character exclaim “I, I, I want existence! That is what I care about” (PP2: 253). That is the natural view, but the reply is as follows:

That which cries out ‘I, I, I want existence’, is not you alone, but everything, absolutely everything that has even a trace of consciousness. Consequently this wish in you is exactly what is not individual … . It does not stem from individuality, but from existence as such; it is essential to everything that is, indeed, it is that whereby it exists.

(PP 2: 253-4)

The view that clings to individuality “would seem childish and utterly ridiculous … if you could know your own essence totally and down to its foundation, namely as the universal will to life that is you” (PP2: 254). Therefore it is hard to conclude that Schopenhauer simply laments death as a great ill. It is true that he documents at length the fact that death is commonly lamented and feared as the greatest evil. But he deploys his monism and his doctrine of the phenomenal nature of individuation to show why from a ‘higher standpoint’ the common lament is unfounded. However, Plümacher identifies the Weltschmerzler trait in the apparent gratification with which Schopenhauer tends to remind the reader of the “horrifying certainly of death” (e.g. WWR 2, 480).

Plümacher's observations hit home even more clearly with respect to Schopenhauer's discussion of the artistic genius. Here he clearly trespasses onto the territory of Plümacher's ‘lyrical-poetic’ Weltschmerzler when he writes of the ‘suffering and essential martyrdom of genius’, citing the eponymous poet of Goethe's Torquato Tasso, and the biography of Byron, among others (WWR 1, 214). This theme is somewhat at odds with his insistence that the genius’ constitutive state of mind is one of pure contemplation, which “calls for a complete forgetting of one's own person and its relationships”, and stands “opposed to a subjective orientation that is directed to one's own person, i.e. the will” (WWR 1, 208–9). What is essential is the genius’ capacity to escape his¹⁵ individuality through enhanced objectivity of cognition. Although the Schopenhauerian genius is by definition a unique individual with abilities superior to those of the majority, the cognitive capacities that constitute genius are seemingly the antithesis of Weltschmerz's individualism and despairing emotionality. Nonetheless Schopenhauer can write that the genius finds a consolation in art that “compensates him for his suffering (which is increased in proportion to his clarity of consciousness) and also for his desolate solitude among a race so different from him” (WWR 1, 295). So it is precisely because of his ability to see the world impersonally that the genius suffers more. Plümacher is acute in locating this self-centred Weltschmerzler aspect in Schopenhauer's writings.

3. Philosophical pessimism

We saw that Schopenhauer escapes from simple Weltschmerz and becomes a proponent of philosophical pessimism. In Plümacher's highly economical characterization, philosophical pessimism consists of just two propositions:

1. the sum of displeasure [Unlust] outweighs the sum of pleasure [Lust]

2. consequently the non-being [Nichtsein] of the world would be better than its being [Sein].

   (Pessimismus, 1)

Plümacher states that Schopenhauer was the first to present this dual doctrine as ‘an indispensable organic part of a complete philosophical system’ (1). For these propositions, consider the following extracts from Chapter 46 of The World as Will and Representation, volume 2:

Just stop and compare the sum of all possible joys that a human being can have in his life with the sum of all possible sufferings that can afflict him in his life. I think that the balance will not be hard to determine.

(WWR 2, 591)

[W]e should be sorry rather than glad about the existence of the world; … its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; … it is something that fundamentally should not be, etc.

(WWR 2, 591–2)

Thus it is true that Schopenhauer states both propositions (i) and (ii). He also states that the mere existence of suffering would be enough to justify the verdict that non-existence would be preferable, since only an entirely perfect world could be justified as an end in itself (Endzweck). So for him the claim that pleasure predominates over pain is not exactly definitive of philosophical pessimism, as Plümacher would have it. Nevertheless, the ‘mere existence of suffering’ argument is hard to defend, and Plümacher can claim to be developing a more rigorous but still Schopenhauerian core to pessimism.

While Plümacher defends the simple position expressed by propositions (i) and (ii), (though, as we shall see, for reasons other than Schopenhauer's), she is highly critical of wider elements of Schopenhauer's system. She makes much of what she calls Schopenhauer's Weltverachtung, his contempt for the world (Pessimismus, 129–33). She calls contempt for the world the ‘official Weltanschauung’ of medieval Christianity (70), focussing on the twelfth-century text De contemptu mundi, whose author later became Pope Innocent III. Plümacher provides a ‘free translation’ of Part One of this treatise, including its tirade against the squalor of human existence with its “disgusting nutrition of the child in the mother's body, … disgusting sickness and deficiency of the body, … you excrete urine, spit and excrement”, and so on (Pessimismus, 66–7). Again, Nietzsche helps himself to wording from Plümacher's translation in his citation of Innocent III at Genealogy II: 7.¹⁶ Like Nietzsche, Plümacher sees Schopenhauer as allying himself too closely to the world-denying aspect of Christianity.

For Plümacher, “religious pessimism … sees the root and cause of the world's suffering in the creaturely choice of sin” (6), and in line with this, Schopenhauer

commits himself to the ethical and religious pessimism of contemptus mundi. He not only views suffering everywhere, he also has night vision [Nachtauge] for seeing guilt everywhere. And he even sees it where it is not, in that he applies the ethical concept ‘guilt’, which has only immanent legitimacy, to existence and its transcendent causality. … 

He directly identifies the world's not being motivated intellectually with its being unjustified. The world's existence which, as unhappy experience teaches, would be better not being, becomes for him something that should not be, meaning something that ought not to be.

(Pessimismus, 129)

Plümacher is acute on Schopenhauer's relation to Christianity. She recognizes that his commitment to atheism is fundamental, and she explains why there cannot be a god in Schopenhauer's world:

according to this theory everything spiritual, everything intellectual, along with the entire realm of form and determination, belongs only to the ‘world as representation’, i.e. to subjective appearance. The ‘how’ of the world is thus, in its relation to the absolute, purely accidental in kind, and for us, as the subject contemplating the world, the only thing that is not so much cognized, as immediately given in our self-experience, is the will, which as a blind principle cannot be God.

(125)

But she rightly emphasizes Schopenhauer's deliberate continuity with strands of Christianity that are pessimistic. In Schopenhauer's view:

Christianity is the doctrine of the profound guilt of the human race through its very existence, and the heart's longing for a redemption that can only be achieved by the most difficult sacrifice and denial of one's own self, and so by a complete overturning of human nature.

(WWR 2, 641)

So it is no surprise that, as Plümacher puts it, “Schopenhauer condemns the world because it is without pleasure, and once he has turned this condemned existence into one that is guiltily attained, the ills of the world now appear to him as a consequence of guilt” (130).¹⁷ There is another link to Nietzsche here, when in Book Five of The Gay Science (1887) he assesses Schopenhauer as an “uncompromising atheist” who can nonetheless be charged with “staying stuck [Steckenbleiben] in … Christian–ascetic moral perspectives”.¹⁸ Again Nietzsche has taken his words from Plümacher, without acknowledgement: she had already written of Schopenhauer's “Steckenbleiben in the scholastic concepts of freedom, guilt and sin” (248).

Plümacher regards contemptus mundi and guilt about our existence as extraneous to philosophical pessimism. But we might turn the argument round, and suggest that her characterization of philosophical pessimism is perhaps too narrow to capture what is distinctive in Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism. Suffering for him is a key to what is most fundamentally wrong with our existence, namely that we will, and specifically that we will to satisfy the ends of the individual. We are trapped in an illusion that these are valuable ends, and in the mistake of lamenting their non-attainment, all of which rests on the cognitive error of believing in the reality of the individual. Until we are released from that belief, suffering is and should be our lot. It is these ideas that Schopenhauer seeks to find buried within Christianity's figurative story of fall and redemption, and its depiction of life as a vale of tears.¹⁹ Plümacher is right that Schopenhauer embraces certain core values of Christianity. For her, as for Nietzsche, this is a criticism, because she wishes to see a philosophical position that is not beholden to Christianity, which she calls a “dogma that has been discarded as irrational” (106). So her criticism is in effect that, while the aforementioned Christian attitudes are central to Schopenhauer's thought, they are extraneous to philosophical pessimism in her own more rigorous characterization.

Plümacher identifies Schopenhauer's conception of individuation as “most disastrous for his system” (131),²⁰ and aims some well-taken criticisms at it. First, how has guilt come about?

If we are told that life is like a guilt [or debt, Schuld] we have incurred, that the sufferings of life are the interest we have to pay on it, and it will only be paid off by death, then the question arises: by whom and when was this guilt incurred?

(130)

If the willing and suffering individual is merely a subjective appearance, then the real locus of guilt and suffering can only be the one essence of the world, the will. So the individual is fundamentally unreal and innocent, yet at the same time is somehow deserving of the punishment life metes out: “each individual is at the same time guilty and innocent, and just as deserving of anger as of compassion” (130). It makes no sense anyway, Plümacher argues, to apply the concept guilt to anything other than a moral agent. So the monistic world-will cannot easily be guilty or responsible in an ethical sense. But we then end in incoherence, with nothing and nobody incurring the supposed guilt that attaches to our existence.

Schopenhauer notoriously has a problem with responsibility that runs into difficulties over individuation: our actions are determined by our character and occurrent motives, yet we have a firm conviction of being ‘the doers of our deeds’.²¹ The proposed solution is that we are free not in our actions, but in our being (esse), which Schopenhauer, following Kant, conceives as our intelligible character. Plümacher (131) gives this idea short shrift: the idea is ‘untenable in and of itself’, but also impossible to integrate into Schopenhauer's own system. For it presupposes individuation outside the empirical realm – something that is distinctively my character, yet not subject to space, time or causality. The same problem also affects Schopenhauer's ethics. For Schopenhauer the sole criterion of an action's moral worth is its stemming from compassion, which he glosses as ‘willing someone else's well-being’.²² But his insistence on the merely phenomenal nature of the individual, citing the Upaniṣads’ tat tvam asi, ‘thou art that’, seems to destroy the point of compassion, says Plümacher, because “only if the ‘thou’ and ‘the others’ are real existences and not merely ‘my representation’ does the criterion of morality have any sense” (246).

Schopenhauer's doctrine of salvation through negation of the will is also muddled by problems concerning individuation, according to Plümacher, so that “it remains totally incomprehensible how redemption from the unhappiness of willing, and thereby from existence, is supposed to take place”:

[I]f the individual is supposed to be only a subjective appearance, only illusion and deception of māyā, then its departure from the world would also be meaningless and itself only illusion. And indeed, that which suffers and longs for redemption is not merely the individual as the object of an onlooking subject, not the illusory image framed in the ‘world as representation’, rather that which wills and suffers is the one will that is concealed behind the illusion of multiple individuals. So if the core of an individual, once it has willed and suffered but also attained cognition, then negates itself and releases itself from existence, the one will would be what had been removed. Therefore if a genuine, real negation of the will were to take place … , the one world-will must cease, and so it would be not merely the individual that ceased to exist through the quietive of pessimistic cognition, but the world.

(132)

Plümacher's concluding comment here is rather sarcastic: if, as Schopenhauer claims, some ascetics have attained total negation of the will, then the world should have come to an end, which it has not. The only alternatives are that what ascetics have achieved is not total negation of the will, or that Schopenhauer's theory of the individual's relation to the world is in error (132). These criticisms of Schopenhauer's confusions over individuation are accurate and damaging. For Plümacher, they show that Schopenhauer to some extent spoiled what could otherwise be a successful pessimistic theory.

4. Plümacher's defence of pessimism

Recall that for Plümacher philosophical pessimism consists simply in the two propositions:

1. the sum of displeasure outweighs the sum of pleasure

2. consequently the non-being of the world would be better than its being. (Pessimismus, 1)

In light of the comparative nature of judgement (ii), the term ‘pessimism’ does not accurately characterize the position at stake, according to Plümacher. The claim is not that the world, or existence, is pessimum, the worst thing. She calls ‘pessimism’ an ‘arbitrary derivative term’ invented to be the counterpart to ‘optimism’ (Pessimismus, 2).²³ Leibniz's optimism genuinely makes a superlative rather than comparative claim about the world's being the best possible, but the denial of (ii) need not be the claim that existence is the best state of affairs; the position that opposes (ii) should strictly be called ‘meliorism’, the claim that ‘the world's existence is an existence to be affirmed, that being is to be preferred to non-being’ (2). Plümacher retains ‘pessimism’ as a standard term and offers no replacement (it would presumably have to be peiorism), but insists that all Schopenhauer can really mean is a comparative judgement.²⁴

Plümacher, like Schopenhauer, holds that (i) is true: the sum of displeasure outweighs the sum of pleasure. But, following Hartmann, she is critical of Schopenhauer's way of establishing (i). Schopenhauer argues that pleasure is negative, as for example in this often-cited passage:

We feel pain, but not painlessness; we feel worry, but not freedom from worry; we feel fear but not security. We feel a desire as we feel hunger and thirst; but as soon as it is fulfilled, it is like a bite of food we have enjoyed, which stops existing for our feeling the moment it is swallowed. We feel the painful loss of pleasures and joys as soon as they are gone: but pains, even if they are present for a long time before departing, are not immediately missed; if we think of them at all it is intentionally, by means of reflection. For only pain and lack can be felt positively and therefore register their presence: well-being on the other hand is merely negative.

(WWR 2: 590)

This runs together a number of distinct points. First, Schopenhauer equates pleasure with the satisfaction of a will or desire, and equates desire with a painfully felt lack. Hence he can claim that pleasure is never ‘pure’, but always conditional upon its relation to some foregoing pain. Second, he makes a point about the salience or importance of pleasures in our conscious attention, claiming that we attend to them less than we do to pains. Finally, he claims that pleasure is negative in the sense that we do not feel it: when a desire is satisfied, we merely experience its absence and return to a ‘neutral’ state without hedonic content. This latter claim is questionable, but it is distinct from the previous two claims and not supported by them. Even if all pleasure were conditional on the cessation of a felt lack, and if pleasure were never salient in our attention, it could not be concluded that pleasure is never positively felt.

Hence Plümacher seems right to dismiss this final claim as support for pessimism's proposition (i):

as a counterpart to Leibniz, who presents displeasure as mere negation of pleasure, [Schopenhauer] attempts just as abortively to explain displeasure as the only positive and pleasure as its negation. Everyone's experience contradicts this theory just as much as it contradicts its optimistic antipode.

(3)

The positive feeling of pleasure is empirically attested in obvious fashion. Plümacher concludes in line with Hartmann that

if we wish to use the designation ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ to apply to mental states of pleasure and displeasure, this can be done only … such that both possess reality to the same degree, and the terminology is used only to fix their position in relation to the ‘zero point of sensation’ (absence of pain [Schmerz] and absence of pleasure)

(3)

The question then arises: how is (i) to be supported? If pleasure and pain both ‘possess reality’ in the sense of being equally felt, and if there are neutral states in which neither is felt, on what grounds can we claim that there is more pain than pleasure? Plümacher gives Hartmann's argument here.²⁵ Pleasure and displeasure both affect the nervous system, and as they endure they cause exhaustion or fatigue (Ermüdung) to the organism;

from this there arises a need (i.e. an unconscious or conscious will) to make the feeling cease or diminish, a need which grows with the degree and duration of the feeling. In the case of displeasure this need adds to the straightforward aversion towards undergoing the displeasure, but in the case of pleasure it subtracts from the will that affirms the pleasure, and not only decreases the pleasure, but can also make the feeling change into displeasure.

(138)

This second-order displeasure through fatigue attaches both to first-order pleasure and to first-order displeasure. As a consequence, while prolonged first-order displeasure just gets worse, prolonged first-order pleasure becomes tedious, or even ceases to be pleasure at all. Thus even if we hypothesized an existence comprising first-order pleasure and displeasure of equal duration and intensity, displeasure would still predominate.

Later comes a slightly puzzling passage:

Now since consideration of the various factors in life shows that there is more pain than pleasure in the world, the result is that the greater part of pleasure in the world has this kind of indirect origin, and this makes Schopenhauer's theory of the negativity of pleasure excusable.

(Pessimismus, 138)

By ‘the various factors of life’ is meant such things as health, youth, freedom, work, hunger, love, compassion, friendship, and so on, which Hartmann had examined at length, discovering that they all contain either a hedonic zero, or more pain than pleasure.²⁶ But there are two rather strange features of the above passage. Following Hartmann closely,²⁷ Plümacher appears simply to assert the predominance of pain over pleasure here, although this had seemed to be a conclusion to be argued towards. Secondly, it seems that an empirical survey of life is required to establish (i), whereas Hartmann elsewhere asserts that the predominance of pain over pleasure or vice versa must “follow with necessity from the nature of the conditions present in the world”, if any systematic pessimism or optimism is to be viable.²⁸ The predominance of displeasure thus seems to be both true a priori and confirmable through empirical evidence – which in fact mirrors Schopenhauer's view. Schopenhauer sees us “convincing ourselves a priori that human life is dispositionally incapable of true happiness” but then says “we could arouse a much more vivid conviction in ourselves if we wanted to take a more a posteriori approach and deal with particular cases” (WWR 1, 349). The upshot of this rather laboured discussion is that Schopenhauer was right for the wrong reason. Pain predominates, but neither because pleasure is always relative to a prior displeasure, nor because pleasure is not positively felt, both of which claims are false.

Proposition (i) is not obviously sufficient by itself to justify (ii). We require at least a suppressed premise to the effect that the value of existence is a function solely of the amount of pleasure versus pain that it contains. Plümacher appears to assert this, stating that “[o]nly the eudaimonological criterion is decisive for the value or disvalue of the world's existence, it is something final which we cannot surpass, and all other criteria must be in accord with it” (137). But what would such ‘other criteria’ be, and why could they not ‘surpass’ the criterion of the amount of pleasure? Plümacher makes this assertion in the context of explaining Hartmann's position, which she says is a pessimism that also encompasses “evolutionary, aesthetic and ethical optimism” (137), meaning that “certain natural and social relations can develop into more valuable ones”, quite in contrast to Schopenhauer, “whose world view is thoroughly ahistorical and explains all development as illusion” (4). On the view Plümacher prefers, things in the world can get better, and indeed “the world is as good as it can be” (it turns out after all to be the best possible world), while at the same time, without contradiction, it remains “worse than [there being] no world”.²⁹

What, then, gives value to these ‘more valuable’ circumstances that may arise in the course of time? If the value they contribute were to be accounted for in hedonic terms, then the claim would have to be that the pleasure in existence can by all means increase, but can never exceed the pain. But that sounds less like a combination of pessimism and optimism, and more like simply a form of pessimism. A more convincing (non-eudaimonological) optimism arises if we we conceive the added value of the ethical, aesthetic and evolutionary developments in terms other than their causing happiness or diminishing pain. But then it threatens to become unclear why the relative lack of pleasure should decide the value of existence as opposed to non-existence. If there are other goods that make it an improving world, then why not disregard the relative amounts of pleasure and displeasure as a side issue, and simply affirm existence, despite its pains, in light of its other values?

5. Hartmann's combination of pessimism and optimism

Hartmann's combination of pessimism with optimism, which Plümacher inherits and seeks to defend, is a defining characteristic of the supposedly better pessimism that Plümacher advocates, but also one of its stranger features. Perhaps stranger still is the claim that this combination enhances pessimism: one might think that adding optimism into the mix will either result in an outright muddled position or rob the pessimism of its title altogether. However, the superiority of the combined position is supposed to lie in its ridding pessimism of the charge of quietism that attends Schopenhauer's version, thus providing a motivation for positive action that is engaged in changing the world.³⁰ Seeing change for the better as possible, one can be practically motivated towards social, ethical, and aesthetic action, and away from passive resignation, but without having to rescind one's commitment to theoretical pessimism.

Even a summary of Hartmann's voluminous and perplexing philosophy is beyond the scope of the present paper. But a glimpse at his position may clarify to some extent the combination of optimism and pessimism that Plümacher wishes to defend. Plümacher explains: “because of the logicality of the pure formal principle, certain natural and social relations can develop into more valuable ones” (4). It is an avowedly post-Hegelian idea: reality in itself contains a form of logicality, or rationality – something Schopenhauer steadfastly denies, because for him the ‘principle’ that grounds the world is merely a blind, empty will. If there is anything to be called ‘logicality’ in the Schopenhauerian world, it pertains not at the metaphysical level, but merely within the intellectual apparatus of finite beings, or, as Hartmann put it disparagingly, “there is only so much reason to be found in the whole world as the fortuitously arisen brain chooses to put into it.”³¹ For Hartmann, by contrast, the world is not only blind, unconscious will, but also unconscious Idea. Plümacher states with characteristic brevity that the absolute is the All-one unconscious spirit [der All-eine unbewusste Geist] of which will and representation are attributes (134).³² The will “posits the ‘that’ of the world” [setzt das ‘dass’ der Welt – i.e. that it exists], while representation “determines its ‘how and what’, i.e. the qualitative characteristics of existence” (134).³³ Thus the content of the world exhibits rationality, and the world really has a non-eudaimonological end that it pursues, becoming better as it works towards that end.

Hartmann's alleged ‘world-process’ takes precedence over everything, to the extent that he urges “the complete devotion of the personality to the world-process for the sake of its goal, the general world-redemption”.³⁴ Plümacher relates the pattern of Hartmann's thinking here with beautiful simplicity:

No goal is discernible in nature and in life other than the increase of consciousness … . But this highest goal of nature cannot be the ultimate goal, the end-goal of the world's existence [because it brings increased suffering] … . Thus consciousness can be the highest goal within existence only by being the means to an absolute end-goal that lies outside the world.

This end-goal is the destruction of the world's existence [Aufhebung des Weltdaseins] through the destruction of the will that grounds the world.

(Pessimismus, 157–8)

This passage achieves in a few words what Hartmann labours to say at length. In his account of world-redemption, he envisages the global cessation of all willing. The process of world-progress increases consciousness, which thereby increases suffering, and ultimately leads to the demand for redemption of the world from itself: in the end the rational element in the world will develop consciousness to a point where it can “hurl back the total actual volition into nothingness, by which the process and the world ceases”.³⁵

Nietzsche ridiculed this theory of world-redemption, calling Hartmann an ‘unconscious parodist’.³⁶ Frederick Beiser finds ‘fantastic’ the idea of the world-process reaching its culmination in the world's cessation, and says that it is “scarcely compatible with the more optimistic side of Hartmann's philosophy, which maintains that life is still worth living at all”.³⁷ But this latter criticism seems out of sympathy with the thrust of Hartmann's admittedly rather troubling argument. If we take seriously the end-goal of his world-process, i.e. the world's cessation, then life is worth living, and positive action for change is worth engaging in, because the world-process is thereby hastened towards its cessation. Progress is progress towards nothingness. This gives a more unifying interpretation of the pessimism–optimism combination. World-redemption into nothingness does not conflict with the optimistic side of Hartmann: it is after all the optimistic side. For Hartmann ends by saying “The logical element … ensures that the world is a best possible world, such a one, namely, as attains redemption, not one whose torment is perpetuated endlessly”.³⁸ This seems to indicate that it is the best world because it can revert to nothingness, because it has within itself an inexorable process towards the achievement of the non-being that was preferable all along. If this is optimism, however, we might wonder whether it would be equally appropriate to call Schopenhauer's position a combination of pessimism and optimism, given that for him the will, while making existence lamentable, also contains the possibility of redemption through its own self-destruction. There are significant differences: Schopenhauer will never say that this world is the best possible, and his mechanism of redemption operates as a kind of psychological conversion, rather than as a ‘logical principle’ in the world itself, making the will's self-negation individual and contingent rather than global and necessary. But still there is a broader structural similarity: for both Hartmann and Schopenhauer the will makes the world something whose non-existence would have been better, but it also contains the potential for its own elimination.

It is doubtful whether Plümacher or Hartmann can claim to have found a better form of pessimism than Schopenhauer's. The theoretical pessimism itself, while resting on different arguments, claims to arrive only at propositions (i) and (ii), which were asserted by Schopenhauer in the first place. The addition of ‘optimism’ relies on the post-Hegelian idea of a rational world-process, which Schopenhauer has no reason to accept – indeed, the absence of such a process is arguably one of the more appealing features of the Schopenhauerian world. The defence of action against quietism also seems unconvincing: all agents must subordinate their ends entirely to a remote and self-destructive world-process, and nothing anyone does could bestow sufficient value on existence to make it preferable to non-existence. As Gardner puts it, “Hartmann's practical philosophy demands a total self-transcendence for which no intelligible motivational root is (or can be) provided”.³⁹

6. Conclusion

Plümacher's close allegiance to Hartmann fixes her writing firmly in her particular portion of the late nineteenth century. Hartmann's combination of optimism and pessimism, which Plümacher accepts as the perfected form of philosophical pessimism, did not prove durable. The conviction that the world comprised a process with an inherent telos that it was pursuing with some kind of (albeit unconscious) rationality did not survive, while Schopenhauer's fundamentally non-rational world of striving and suffering retained a greater appeal and proved amenable to more naturalistic appropriations, providing Nietzsche in particular with an urgent existential problem to address. Nietzsche had to struggle with Schopenhauer, but he could ridicule Hartmann. So some central parts of Plümacher's critique of Schopenhauer fail to impress. However, when less restricted by following the details of Hartmann's system, she exhibits intellectual qualities that enable her to bring Schopenhauer's position into sharp focus. Plümacher usefully epitomizes a view of Schopenhauer's pessimism held by his would-be pessimist ‘followers’, and makes pointed objections that anticipate criticisms by more recent commentators. By locating Schopenhauer within the early nineteenth-century ambience of Weltschmerz, she reveals in him a degree of self-regard that seems in tension with his theoretical diminishment of the individual and hostility towards egoism. She is keenly aware that the status of the individual vis-à-vis the world-will is unresolved in Schopenhauer's system, leading to numerous difficulties concerning responsibility, guilt, compassion, and salvation. As we saw, Plümacher rightly accuses Schopenhauer of clinging to remnants of Christianity that are arguably unnecessary for his pessimistic description of the world, and which themselves import irresolvable problems. Finally, as we have also seen, Plümacher's book helped Nietzsche with some useful examples and apt phrases to criticize both Schopenhauer and the modern Weltschmerzler, which neither Nietzsche nor the wider scholarly community have acknowledged, but which live on as an unseen legacy in The Gay Science and On the Genealogy of Morality.⁴⁰

Notes

1 I cite the 1888 edition throughout.

2 For a biography, see Rolf Kieser, Olga Plümacher-Hünerwadel. See Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz, 168–9, 182–5; Beiser, After Hegel, 218–19; Tobias Dahlkvist, Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism (37, 222); and Domenico M. Fazio, “Einleitung. Die ‘Schopenhauer-Schule’. Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs”, 27–9.

3 I retain ‘Weltschmerz’ throughout. ‘World-weariness’ would more accurately translate Weltmüdigkeit, a term Plümacher also uses, in association with Christianity (Pessimismus, 48).

4 Pessimismus, 1. Translations from Plümacher's book are my own.

5 She lists Eugen Dühring, Ferdinand Laban, Raphael Koeber, Moriz Venetianer, and A. Taubert as “pessimists without their own independent system” (Pessimismus, 175–7).

6 For succinct accounts of Hartmann's philosophy see Beiser, Weltschmerz, 122–61; Sebastian Gardner, “Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious”; and Jean-Claude Wolf, “Eduard von Hartmann als Schopenhauerianer?”.

7 Beiser, Weltschmerz, 182.

8 Beiser, After Hegel, 160.

9 Thomas Brobjer, Nietzsche's Philosophical Context, 99. For a list of the annotations, see Campioni et al., Nietzsches Persönliche Bibliothek, 467–8.

10 Hence, for all Beiser's advocacy of Plümacher, she might not have approved of the linking of philosophical pessimism and Weltschmerz in his recent title.

11 Plümacher, “Pessimism”, 88.

12 See Campioni et al., Nietzsches Persönliche Bibliothek, 568.

13 Plümacher's “heavenly blissfulness of seeing the damned roasting in hell” also finds an echo at Genealogy I: 15, where Nietzsche cites that attitude in Aquinas and Tertullian.

14 Schopenhauer's works are cited as follows: BM On the Basis of Morals; FW Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will; PP 2 Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2.; WWR 1, WWR 2 The World as Will and Representation, Vols. 1 and 2.

15 Schopenhauer's notorious view is that “Females can have significant talent but not genius” (WWR 2, 409).

16 Compare the German texts. Plümacher, Pessimismus, 66–7: “wir sind aus unreinem Samen hervorgegangen. … Ekelhaft ist die Ernährung des Kindes im Mutterleibe … du aber scheidest Urin, Speichel und Koth aus; … du aber gibst abscheulichen Gestank non dir!” and Nietzsche, Genealogy II: 7; ‘unreine Erzeugung, ekelhafte Ernährung im Mutterleibe, Schlechtigkeit des Stoffs, aus dem der Mensch sich entwickelt, scheusslicher Gestank, Absonderung von Speichel, Urin und Koth’.

17 Plümacher here cites WWR 2, 595–6: “If we want to measure the degree of guilt with which our existence itself is burdened, just look at the suffering linked to it. Every great pain, whether physical or mental, tells us what we deserve, because it could not befall us unless we deserved it.”

18 The Gay Science, sect. 357.

19 See especially WWR 2, 600, 643–4.

20 She also reminds us (Pessimismus, 246) of Schopenhauer's confession that he does not explore “how deeply the roots of individuation go” into reality (PP2, 206. See also WWR 2, 658).

21 FW, 105.

22 See BM, 201; 254

23 See Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious III, 12.

24 Schopenhauer tries to take ‘pessimism’ in a strict superlative sense in one passage where he argues that this is the worst possible world (WWR 2, 598–9).

25 She gives a paraphrase of Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious II, 13–14.

26 See Philosophy of the Unconscious II, 23–79.

27 Philosophy of the Unconscious II, 14.

28 “Ist der pessimistische Monismus trostlos?”, 73 (my translation and emphasis).

29 Plümacher, Pessimismus, 136.

30 Hartmann makes this clear in his essay “Ist der pessimistiche Monismus trostlos?”, 74–8.

31 Philosophy of the Unconscious, III, 149.

32 Hartmann makes the same point, Philosophy of the Unconscious, III, 187–97: however, according to Sebastian Gardner, this is an unconvincing late attempt at explanation on Hartmann's part, and is at odds with Hartmann's basic notion that “Will and Idea are … alien to one another in all thinkable respects” (“Edward von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious”, 190).

33 The dichotomy of ‘that’ versus ‘how’ and ‘what’ stems from the later Schelling. See Gardner, “Edward von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious”, 187.

34 Philosophy of the Unconscious, III, 133.

35 Philosophy of the Unconscious, III, 142.

36 Untimely Meditations II, 107–16.

37 Weltschmerz, 156.

38 Philosophy of the Unconscious, III, 142.

39 “Edward von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious”, 196.

40 I thank Sebastian Gardner, Anthony Jensen, Christine Lopes, Dennis Vanden Auweele, Gudrun von Tevenar, and two anonymous referees for this journal, for comments on earlier drafts.