I’ll never forget that day.
As I recall, it was a sunny day, and the birds were chirping. There was a stillness in the air that was calm. The garden around me felt almost like a vacuum, sealed away from the rest of the world.
Little did I know, that garden would mark the beginning of a journey that hasn’t yet ended. It would be my entry point into a world of thought and experience I was oblivious to. As I now understand it, it was my introduction to philosophical pessimism.
Philosophical pessimism should not be confused with pessimism as it is normally defined. It isn’t all doom and gloom, “everything sucks” thinking. Granted, there are forms of philosophical pessimism that are far too extreme for me (read: Anti-natalism), but there is too much of it that resonates with me to hide from it and let it stay in the dark.
Only now with hindsight do I realize that the details of what happened in the garden don’t actually matter - it was the result of the experience that holds significance. Up until that point I was a year sober, and absolutely hooked on the optimistic philosophies of C.S. Lewis and William James. There is still so much about their philosophies that I love, and if you’ve read these Reflections, you know I quote them both often. While each was optimistic in his own way - Lewis through theology, James through pragmatism - they both reaffirmed a life view that I so desperately wanted to believe in. I wanted to believe that the fundamental substance of life was good, and I wanted to believe that a life spent striving toward the good had real, intrinsic value. Needless to say, my experience in the garden challenged everything I knew.
There are many different forms of philosophical pessimism with a variety of different beliefs, but for my purposes here, I want to bring up three:
Life has negative value (i.e. is fundamentally bad, evil, etc.)
Pain and suffering outweighs pleasure
Life is meaningless
If you’re starting to get scared, don’t worry - I promise I’m getting somewhere. After my experience in the garden, my mental framework could no longer be a container for the zealous optimist that it held up to that point. I remember the feeling of my mind breaking, like it couldn’t hold all the information in. I had encountered the first “crack” in the veneer of my joyous new outlook, and from then on, I couldn’t stop staring at the cracks. They stuck out at every turn, at every corner, during every interaction. It was almost as if I had blinded myself with optimism, and the veil was stripped away. Even to this day, it’s hard to let go of the comfort of that blindness. I see it everywhere around me, especially on social media - we live in the Age of Positive Thinking after all.
The most fascinating part about all of this is that none of it is new. Pessimism has a lot in common with two of my favorite worldviews - that of the Buddhists, who believe all life to be suffering, and that of the Gnostics, who believe the world was literally created by an evil sub-god called the Demiurge (not kidding). Mythical or not, it shows that humanity has been wrestling with the negative worldview for a long, long time.
So, you’re probably wondering if I’m a pessimist. I can’t say that I am - these days I fluctuate between all sorts of worldviews, from pragmatism to hermeticism and everything in between. What I will say is, I’m not afraid to look at it. I’m not afraid to think about a completely meaningless world and the implications that would have. I’m not afraid to think about a world with a foundation of evil. If it’s not all true, experience says that at least some of it most certainly is.
The conclusion to all of this is the most important part: no matter who created the world, no matter what humanity is, no matter how much evil there is in the world, the result is the same. This is where pragmatism’s result-oriented thinking reigns supreme. When you look at it all on the whole, none of these things actually matter. It’s the pitfalls of philosophical masturbation - there will never be an actual answer.
The only thing we have is ourselves - our minds and our bodies at any given moment. The structure and framework of things does not change what we should with them. Helping (and not hurting) others is paramount in both a good world and an evil one. Constant growth, striving to be better, building strong relationships and respecting oneself and others- the same truth applies with all of these as well. The answers to life are right in front of us, as they always have been. No person or god needs to tell us what do do - we already have that built in.