How Pessimists Should Avoid Despair
And be uplifted by pantheism, comedic absurdity, and technological progress.
If you read much philosophy and combine it with the upshot of scientific knowledge, you’re likely to have grown more skeptical and pessimistic than the average person who doesn’t consider the foundations of our ways of life. You may think of this pessimism as mere realism, as you’re better acquainted with the real world as far as it’s rationally explainable. But the intellectual has an extra burden to bear, as the Book of Ecclesiastes famously attests: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief” (1:18).
Philosophy tends to make us jaded — not necessarily nihilistic or dismissive of all redeeming features of life, but gloomier or less carefree than less reflective folks, just as the added weight of experience makes adults wearier and more anxious than children. Unphilosophical adults face plenty of hardships, too, but they can always hope for farfetched salvation as dictated by some conspiracy theory or uplifting religious creed, whereas by exploring the barren outer reaches of knowledge, philosophers are driven to melancholy.
Personally, I’ve studied philosophy up to the graduate level and have written thousands of pages of what many nonphilosophers would call harsh, cynical, perhaps even self-destructive criticisms of everything from politics to religion to philosophy to popular culture.
How, then, do I survive these reflections? Why don’t I shrivel up in a corner, succumbing to madness or despair? More precisely, what are some life-affirming propositions that even I can present without betraying my intellectual standards?
Objectivity and Aesthetics
One saving grace, if you like, is found in nature’s creativity. True, when we objectify nature, and explain scientifically how events unfold by positing causal relations to account for the patterns we observe, we eliminate conventional values from the world. That is, we realize that moral, religious, and political values are only subjective.
If you look objectively, say, at an act of murder, you’re looking at the physical event, at the time and place and the bodily movements, and so on. If you’re looking at the event objectively, from a scientific standpoint, you won’t find the event’s moral badness. To get to that kind of badness, you posit something like God or a metaphysical purpose which everything tries to achieve. You assume God created people to perform certain functions, for example, so that when you’re committing murder you’re malfunctioning. But those moves are speculative and faith-based, not rigorous or empirical.
Does objectivity entail nihilism, then, the dismissal of values as being baseless? I think not, because there are at least two kinds of value that piggyback on scientific objectivity.
First, there are the epistemological standards that motivate scientific inquiry. These are the values of rationality and of methodological naturalism which assume a social purpose at least of human inquiry. That purpose is the humanistic, Promethean one: we attempt to understand nature to control it and to enrich our lives. That philosophical ideal which motivates scientific institutions may prove in the end to be heroic or foolhardy, but the point is that it replaces nihilism.
In other words, scientific objectivity presupposes the merit of the scientific endeavour. We do science to learn how nature works because we assume that knowledge is needed to improve our condition. That assessment of knowledge’s usefulness may prove mistaken in the end, but it’s still part of the scientific method.
Second, and perhaps more interestingly, there’s the aesthetic value found in nature itself via objective detachment. Again, when you’re thinking objectively, you’re abstracting from your personal preoccupations and thinking at the most general, species level. Ultimately, you’d be considering the physics of the situation which would be the same for anyone on the planet and even for extraterrestrials.
Thus, rational objectivity overlaps with the aesthetic stance, since when you’re looking at an artwork, you’re likewise attempting to recognize the qualities that inhere in the work and to let them wash over you. Both perspectives are forms of detachment: you’re letting your reason or your openness to being moved by the painting or poem take hold of your whole mentality, so you’re not selfishly scheming about something else in that moment. You’re thinking algorithmically (logically) or you’re focussing on the immediate content of your sense experience, on the colours in the painting or the poet’s word choices.
The difference between those two types of objectifications is that science is an attempt to understand how things work, whereas aesthetic appreciation is a way of entering a peak state of consciousness, an experience of the sublime or of some deep meaning of life. Strictly speaking, that’s the meaning supplied by the artwork, which is largely a matter of taste. When we’re engaging with art such as a song, a poem, or a painting, we’re being open but not robotically neutral. If we ignored all our background knowledge, we wouldn’t even be registering the item as an art object that calls for scrutiny. So different people will be moved by different works of art, which makes art at least partly subjective.
Pantheism and Aesthetic Morality
But there’s a more general kind of aesthetic appreciation that piggybacks on scientific objectivity, which is why scientists are often struck by what they call the beauty of their equations and of the natural processes they model. There’s a gestalt switch that happens when you flip from the instrumental, Faustian mode in which you’re thinking logically to understand how a process works so you can exploit it, to the aesthetic one in which you’re ignoring your personal biases and being open to the creative power of what you’re witnessing.
From that scientific-aesthetic perspective, we can’t help but marvel at nature’s creativity. Indeed, every scientific explanation of a causal relation is a positing of some natural development which is a form of creativity. It might be a case of mindless creative destruction by natural forces, laws, and initial conditions, but the inhuman scale of the forms and patterns self-produced by godless nature is nonetheless stupefying.
The relevance of this is twofold. First, what might have been a grave threat to our will to live, what Max Weber called the scientific “disenchantment of nature” casts a spell that re-enchants nature, as it were. Instead of ending up with nihilism, what science and naturalistic philosophy leave us with is something like pantheism, an aesthetic appreciation of nature’s supreme creative power.
Second, some of the moral and religious values that objectivity undermines can be reconstructed in aesthetic terms. If nature’s creativity is metaphysically primary, so are aesthetic values of originality, in which case clichés end up as the worst sins. The civilized humanistic ambition to build an artificial world to supplant the natural wilderness can be construed as a “divinely” sanctioned, grand artistic project. We’re trying to inject novel purpose into the lifeless universe, struggling against entropy, against the environment’s indifference to our welfare, and even against our animal instincts which act like nature’s censors that impede our artistic flow.
Comedic Absurdity
There’s another value system that follows from what would otherwise look like a source of doom, namely from the atheistic absurdity of life. If there’s no personal creator of the universe, nature somehow creates and evolves itself out of chaos or nothing, so there’s no cosmic plan that necessarily vindicates the emergence of life, let alone us as individuals. There are the aesthetics of natural and of anti-natural creativity, but artworks take on greater meaning from their tragic fragility. In any case, life is still existentially absurd in that we’re part of a monstrous, uncanny universe that happens to evolve myriad stars and planets that astonish us.
Yet that very absurdity — the ludicrousness of godless creativity which will likely overtake ours when our species is eventually extinguished — is the stuff of comedic values. Comedy is premised on absurdity. We laugh when foolishness is treated as though it were serious. The mismatches are amusing rather than just depressing, assuming we’re not the butt of the joke or we can transcend our personal preoccupations and look at the matter more objectively. Often, we say some time must pass before certain jokes can be told.
Here’s another source of comfort, then, that’s found even in the pit of despair, when we’re afflicted with the costs of atheism, with nature’s amoral outcomes. The more you appreciate life’s absurdity, the more you’ve proven you have a sense of humour. The one follows inexorably from the other. Thus, comedy can lighten an oppressively rational worldview. See, for example, Monty Python’s movies, Gary Larson’s “Far Side” comic strips, Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” or countless other intellectual, absurdist comedies.
Transhumanism and Technological Progress
A third relief derives from confidence in our technological progress. To the extent that they happen at all, social advances tend to be forced rather than chosen by a more enlightened perspective. Often, a minority of farseeing individuals are ahead of their time, so they’re hounded as heretics. Chances are, then, for largescale social advances to happen, for us to save ourselves from the effects of our aggression and short-sightedness, we’ll be forced into doing so by technological developments.
For example, the Arab Spring failed to empower the majority of Muslims in the Middle East at the expense of the dictators and police states in the region. But the technologies of globalization, including social media are beginning to pressure the dictators by enabling the masses to organize.
Similarly, Occupy Wall Street failed to reform crony capitalism in the United States. If anything will do so, it won’t be a mere sentimental appeal to progressive platitudes, but technologies like the internet that decentralize power in postindustrial societies. Of course, there’s no guarantee since the wealthy can clamp down and take control of these technologies, as they’re doing with monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
But technologies emerge on a timetable that isn’t purely political or economical, so the advances can shake up ossified societies, as happened in the Protestant Revolution when the printing press undermined the Church’s hold over the Latin Bible. Capitalism feeds this technological progress by providing the financial incentive for innovation, but this means that capitalism as we know it may be unstable. Capitalism develops the means of eliminating middle managers, empowering average workers, and destabilizing neofeudal arrangements.
Moreover, as Yuval Harari points out in Homo Deus, advances in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence have the potential to revolutionize human nature, which can take us to some fantastic approximations of science fictional scenarios.
This is just a hope for the best, but it’s a hope that’s not based on a deus ex machina. Unlike social progress which is slow and rare, technological advances are substantial and they’re proceeding at a rapid pace. These changes could prove catastrophic or dystopian, or they could enable us to fulfill the humanistic ambition of deifying us — not just with a mystical metaphor of union with a prior godhood, but by tangibly turning us into immortal beings in vast creative landscapes. That’s the dream that religions would only have foreshadowed and that scientists, innovators, engineers, and all the facets of modernity have been working so feverishly to realize.
This is the dream of transhumanism, and it makes for a more responsible and relevant religious faith than the ancient benighted ones. Of course, Christianity has demonized this dream as the quintessence of Satanic ingratitude. If there’s no God, though, there’s no devil. In religion there are only ecstatic creative visions that drive us to live in certain ways. Which way is best is up to us, but the stakes are high so we should ensure that we’re acting on inspiration.
