Few books have so swiftly and drastically changed my approach to researching and teaching the problem of evil as Mara van der Lugt’s Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering. Throughout her detailed study, van der Lugt masterfully ties together the twin strands of pessimism and the problem of evil. Her focus throughout is on the renewed urgency with which Enlightenment thinkers discussed the age-old problem of evil. Alleviating suffering required an analysis of evil and a moral reorientation, which in turn gave birth to the philosophical movement we now know as pessimism. Rather than viewing pessimism as despair, van der Lugt shows how it fosters ethical drives based on “hope, compassion, and consolation” (21).
Van der Lugt specifically argues for what she calls value-oriented pessimism. In formulating this concept, she is explicitly addressing what she refers to as the time-oriented pessimism of Joshua Foa Dienstag’s excellent work, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton University Press, 2006). To van der Lugt, time-oriented pessimism (or future-oriented pessimism) refers to the philosophical stance that time is a burden to the human condition and that things are either getting worse, or at least not improving. Value-oriented pessimism, on the other hand, refers to how people value life—how we weigh life’s evils against life’s goods. To van der Lugt, value-oriented pessimism places pessimism and optimism on a more equal footing and precludes any claims that either position is a mere expression of psychology or temporary emotion (i.e., pessimism as merely “feeling blue” or being bad-tempered).
What van der Lugt refers to as her “bifocal” approach is exemplified in the way her chapters move back-and-forth in focus between the problem of evil and pessimism (22). In her first chapter, the 17th-century French lexicographer and iconoclast Pierre Bayle and his contemporary Nicolas Malebranche are set in dialogue with one another, focusing predominantly on the problem of human suffering, or physical evil in their parlance. Chapter 2, on the other hand, investigates the twin responses to Bayle in the works of the metaphysician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and William King, the Archbishop of Dublin. This latter chapter further serves to delineate the optimistic viewpoint against which the Baylean strand of Dark Matters will persistently argue. Chapter 3 explores how Voltaire’s satirical works forcefully portray the reality of evil over against 18th-century Deists’ attempts to explain evil away in light of the apparent goodness of the universe. In chapter 4, the physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie and mathematician Pierre Louis de Maupertuis convincingly describe the phenomenological asymmetry of suffering: we experience pain more acutely and remember its effects far more vividly than we do life’s pleasures.
Chapters 5 through 7 show how Bayle’s pessimism is taken up and developed by such Enlightenment heavyweights as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. It is in chapter 6 that van der Lugt most successfully offers a critical and complementary counterpoint to Dienstag’s characterization of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the pessimist par excellence. In Dienstag’s reading of Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) , Rousseau declares that a person is born free but becomes enchained over time by social custom. Therefore, Rousseau is a time-oriented pessimist. Van der Lugt, contra Dienstag, highlights Rousseau’s declaration that humans are born free and that freedom is an unqualified human good. Therefore, according to van der Lugt, Rousseau is not a value-oriented pessimist because the good of natural freedom outweighs the accrual of the chains of social custom. To van der Lugt, value-oriented pessimism does not negate time-oriented pessimism. Rather, value-oriented pessimism is deeper and more fundamental, with time-oriented (or future-oriented) pessimism as an offshoot.
Van der Lugt’s seventh chapter on Kant provides a case of what not to say in response to suffering. The jewel of this chapter is van der Lugt’s portrayal of Kant’s unsympathetic advice in his letters to Maria van Herbert, who sought advice from the great philosopher in her depression but ultimately committed suicide. Dark Matters repeatedly insists on the value of consolation and offering hope. Yet Kant, ever the systematic thinker, provides an object lesson in the dangers of prioritizing rational judgment and philosophical consistency over human sympathy. In a similar vein in chapter 8, though Arthur Schopenhauer is often characterized as pessimistic and ascetic to a fault, van der Lugt points to passages in his notebooks which provide grounds for hopeful pessimism: “Nevertheless, in [the human world] there occur, though quite sporadically but always surprising us anew, appearances of honesty, of goodness, even of nobility, and likewise of great understanding, of the thinking mind, even of genius” (Parerga & Paralipomena II.199, Cambridge University Press, 2014-2017; cited in Dark Matters, 394).
It is important to note that Dark Matters, while historically rigorous and chronological in structure, is predominantly philosophical, even explicitly characterizing her method as “dialogic” (19). In keeping with her focus on hope and consolation as the proper domain of philosophical pessimism, van der Lugt employs what she calls a “hermeneutic of sympathy” throughout (18). Referring to misery and suffering, she declares her vision of hopeful pessimism: “The message of pessimism is that this, too, is a part of life, and that it deserves a place in our language, our shared experience; that we are not justified, that it is never justified, to close our eyes to that other, darker, ‘terrible’ side of life” (415).
Prospective readers of Dark Matters should come to this work first of all for van der Lugt’s masterclass in exegesis of Enlightenment philosophy and cultural criticism. Readers should stay for her personal insights into the problem of suffering and her ingenious insistence on pessimism as a moral source. Don’t be fooled by its somber title; Dark Matters is a treasure-trove of moral argument and inspired philosophical insights that left this reader consoled and hopeful.
David Greder is an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Waldorf University.
David Greder
Date Of Review:
September 29, 2023
