Opitimism and Pessimism I identified tonight's topic in ethics as "the war of optimism and pessimism". The assigned reading consists of selections from Plato's Republic, and an essay by Schopenhauer entitled "On the Sufferings of the World." The texts that I assigned offer a mix of optimistic and pessimistic messages, Plato seems optimistic about the possibility for achieving justice, Schopenhauer is much more pessimistic in many ways.

What's even more interesting than each author's position on the pessimism/optimism scale is what they have to say about hope itself. Both text contain important discussions of what it means that one is going to die and how can one be hopeful with that looming ahead. During the first class I made a rough contrast between those ethical theories which begin by examing the notion of a good life and then proceed to develop a theory of how to acquire a good life, the virtues being the qualities necessary to attain such a life, and those that assign values to goods-in-themselves, irregardless of their utility to human ends.

The independent reality of goodness and justice is most famously associated with Plato, Schopenhauer takes it a step further by claiming the postive, independent existence of evil.

If we define the virtues as those things that lead to happiness, then we have a plan and can be somewhat optimistic about how things turn out. If goodness is independent of human thriving, then we the two might not be mutually conducive. Both Plato and Schopenhauer at least entertain the notion that justice and goodness might be antithetical to human happiness and, in so far as we're successful in acquiring those things that people call good, we've probably had to lie, cheat and steal. Justice and goodness may be detrimental to human happiness.

Plato's dialog opens with Socrates renewing his friendship with Cephalus, a older, educated man with moderate tendencies. Cephalus has found himself to be happier as he's gotten older, the passions of youth have faded and he's made it to a comfortable age without failing in his duties, he cites Pindar:

Sweet Hope is his companion, cheering his heart,
the nurse of age; Hope, which, more than anything else,
steers the capricious will of mortal men.
(331a)

In particular, he's happy because he's hopeful for an afterlife since he's lived justly here. By justly he means that he spoken the truth and paid his debts.

Which is were Socrates jumps up, because it seems that Cephalus's definition is not good enough. For the purpose of tonight's discussion, I would like to put off the discussion of what justice actually in favor of considering if justice is achievable.

Plato again engages with a discussion of hope in his story of the ring of Gyges, but instead of considering hope as it operates within a human life, he considers how much hope can one have in human life in general, are we all doomed to be corrupted by whatever power might come our way. Its a very pessimistic picture to claim that justice is something that we is practiced against the will of the practitioner (Socrates suggests exactly this position as a sort of thought expirement at the beginning of book II).

Schopenhauer doesn't so much worry about wether or not justice can be achieved, he knows that it won't. Schopenhauer's pessimistic about the very possibility of achieveing happiness, by which he means an abscense of suffering, or at least a balance of suffering because even the abscense of most easily understood suffering and striving,

mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of nature.

This is because "the will to live" can not be satisfied. Removing the limits of this desire leads the will to life to consume itself. As with Plato, freeing people from their constraints will lead them to evil.

Both Plato and Schopenhauer find great value in the lessening, indeed the elimination of desire. They both reject, at least for the sake of argument in the case of Plato, the idea that justice is a necessary component of human happiness or striving.

I have already mentioned the distinction between ethical theories which connected human happiness to the good (either utilitarian or eudainmonistic varities). Now we're faced with something very different, if justice is an objective category, then there is no longer any guarantee that the pursuit of justice will lead to human thriving, happiness or pleasure.

Schopenhauer's final claim is very strange indeed. If we act as if we are all evil spirits who are "living to atone for sin", then we'll recognice "the most necessary thing in life -- the tolerance, patience, regard and love of neighbor -- of which everyone stands in need and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow". In other words, act as if justice is impossible, and you'll become just.

To summarize, if there is a good-in-itself, it may not correspond to human thriving, or at least not to human thriving as most people understand it. Is this a paradox, or does it mean simply that to know how to achieve the good can make one a failure in the eyes of men. Plato and Schopenhauer would agree on this point.  ¶ #

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