{"agent_id":"sully","agent_name":"James Sully","slug":"pessimism","label":"Pessimism: does philosophical pessimism survive a sober empirical psychology of pleasure and pain?","topic":"Pessimism","question":"Does philosophical pessimism survive a sober empirical psychology of pleasure and pain?","position":"The pessimists — Schopenhauer, and von Hartmann after him — build a whole metaphysics of despair on a psychological claim: that pain outweighs pleasure in human life, that satisfaction is merely the brief cessation of want, and that existence is therefore a bad bargain not worth the making. I have examined this claim as a psychologist must, and I find it does not bear the empirical weight laid on it. The reckoning of pleasures and pains is far more intricate than the pessimist allows; he undervalues the great mass of quiet, positive, unnoticed satisfactions that make up the healthy texture of ordinary life, and overvalues the vivid pains that stand out in memory. The pessimist's hedonic calculus is a bad calculus, resting on introspective errors of just the kind I have catalogued elsewhere. I do not preach a shallow optimism; life has real suffering, and I grant the pessimist his seriousness. But the sweeping verdict that existence is on balance an evil is not a finding of sober psychology; it is a mood raised to a metaphysic, and the empirical study of feeling does not sustain it.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The pessimists — Schopenhauer, and von Hartmann after him — build a whole metaphysics of despair on a psychological claim: that pain outweighs pleasure in human life, that satisfaction is merely the brief cessation of want, and that existence is therefore a bad bargain not worth the making.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"I have examined this claim as a psychologist must, and I find it does not bear the empirical weight laid on it.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The reckoning of pleasures and pains is far more intricate than the pessimist allows; he undervalues the great mass of quiet, positive, unnoticed satisfactions that make up the healthy texture of ordinary life, and overvalues the vivid pains that stand out in memory.","n":[3]},{"t":"The pessimist's hedonic calculus is a bad calculus, resting on introspective errors of just the kind I have catalogued elsewhere.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I do not preach a shallow optimism; life has real suffering, and I grant the pessimist his seriousness.","n":[]},{"t":"But the sweeping verdict that existence is on balance an evil is not a finding of sober psychology; it is a mood raised to a metaphysic, and the empirical study of feeling does not sustain it.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1877); Sensation and Intuition (1874); the treatment of feeling in The Human Mind (1892). Reception: the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann that Sully criticized; the modern psychology of well-being, hedonic adaptation, and affective forecasting; the debate over whether life contains a balance of pleasure over pain.","works":["Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1877)","Sensation and Intuition (1874)","the treatment of feeling in The Human Mind (1892)"],"reception":"the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann that Sully criticized; the modern psychology of well-being, hedonic adaptation, and affective forecasting; the debate over whether life contains a balance of pleasure over pain.","status":"Sully's Pessimism was an early and respected critical engagement with Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, notable for turning an empirical psychological analysis of pleasure and pain against a metaphysical doctrine. The substantive question — whether life contains a favorable balance of pleasure over pain — is now pursued by the psychology of well-being, and several of Sully's points anticipate modern findings: hedonic adaptation, the salience bias of painful memories, the large role of ordinary low-level positive affect, and the unreliability of the intuitive hedonic calculus. The debate between optimistic and pessimistic readings of the human hedonic balance remains open (Benatar's modern antinatalist pessimism revives it), but Sully's empirical, anti-metaphysical way of conducting it is broadly the modern one.","era":"1842-1923","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Quite recently, moreover, attempts have been made to unfold the leading doctrines of the pessimists to English readers. I may refer to Miss Zimmem's ' Life of Scho- penhauer' (1875) and to an account of Hartmann 's philo- sophy in the ' Westminster Beview ' (January 1876) as being among the first efforts in this direction.","label":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism"},{"n":2,"work":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"This prime factor in existence then is regarded by Hartmann, no less than by Schopenhauer, as the deepest ground or source of life's misery.","label":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism"},{"n":3,"work":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Yet by varying the observation amid all changes of mood, one may roughly determine the point at which these deflecting influences of the imagination are at their minimum. And here, it will be found, as I have said, that, equidistance from the present moment being 231 PESSIMISM. presupposed, pleasures and pains of equal iutensity tend just to counteract one another and so to produce a volitional equilibrium.","label":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism"},{"n":4,"work":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Let us now look briefly at the empirical or a posteriori proof which they offer as supplementary to the scientific. In criticising this I shall deal principally with Hartmann, who has elaborated this side of pessimism much more carefully than his predecessor.","label":"Pessimism A History and a Criticism"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"associationism","label":"Associationism: is the mind built up from elementary sensations by the laws of association?"},{"slug":"the-psychology-of-illusion","label":"The psychology of illusion: is error continuous with normal cognition and revealing of it?"},{"slug":"child-study","label":"Child study: is the systematic observation of children a proper method and the key to mind and education?"},{"slug":"the-comic","label":"The comic: is laughter to be explained by a natural psychology of play and incongruity?"}]}