The Philosophy of Despair

by David Starr Jordan

There is much to discourage in human history,—in the facts of human life. The common man, after all the ages, is still very common. He is ignorant, reckless, unjust, selfish, easily misled. All public affairs bear the stamp of his weakness. Especially is this shown in the prevalence of destructive strife. The boasted progress of civilization is dissolved in the barbarism of war. Whether glory or conquest or commercial greed be war's purpose, the ultimate result of war is death. Its essential feature is the slaughter of the young, the brave, the ambitious, the hopeful, leaving the weak, the sickly, the discouraged to perpetuate the race. Thus all militant, nations become decadent ones. Thus the glory of Rome, her conquests and her splendor of achievement, left the Romans at home a nation of cowards, and such they are to this day. For those who survive are not the sons of the Romans, but of the slaves, scullions, the idlers and camp-followers whom the years of Roman glory could not use and did not destroy. War blasts and withers all that is worthy in the works of man.

That there seems no way out of this is the cause of the sullen despair of so many scholars of Continental Europe. The millennium is not in sight. It is farther away than fifty years ago. The future is narrowing down and men do not care to forecast it. It is enough to grasp what we may of the present. We hear "the ring of the hammer on the scaffold." "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." "The sad kings," in Watson's phrase, can only pile up fuel for their own destruction, and the failure of force will release the unholy brood which force has caused to develop. The winds of freedom are tainted by sulphurous exhalations. In all our merry-making we find with Ibsen that "there is a corpse on board." The mask is falling only to show the Death's head there concealed. Aristocracy, Democracy, Anarchy, Empire, the history of politics, is the eternal round of the Dance of Death.

When we look at human nature in detail we find more of animal than of angel, and the "veracity of thought and action," which is the choicest gift of Science, is lost in the happy-go-lucky movement of the human mob. "To see things as they really are" is the purpose of the philosophy of Pessimism in the hands of its worthiest exponents. But we know what is, and that alone, even were such knowledge possible, is not to know the truth. The higher wisdom seeks to find the forces at work to produce that which now is. The present time is the meeting time of forces; the present fact their temporary product. To the philosophy of Evolution, "every meanest day is the conflux of two eternities." Each meanest fact is the product of the world-forces that lie behind it; each meanest man the resultant of the vast powers, alive in human nature, struggling since life began. And these forces, omnipotent and eternal, will never cease their work.

To the philosophy of Pessimism, the child is a mere human larva, weak, perverse, disagreeable, the heir of mortality, with all manner of "defects of doubt and taints of blood," gathered in the long experience of its wretched parentage.

In the more hopeful view of Evolution the child exists for its possibilities. The huge forces within have thrown it to the surface of time. They will push it onward to development, which may not be much in the individual case, but beyond it all lie the possibilities of its race. Inherent in it is the power to rise, to form its own environment, to stand at last superior to the blind forces by which the human will was made. With this thought is sure to come, in some degree, the certainty that the heart of the Universe is sound, that though there be so many of us in the world, each must have his place, and each at last "be somehow needful to infinity." We can see that each least creature has its need for being. The present justifies the past. It is the transcendent future which renders the commonplace present possible.

The "dragons of the prime,
That tore each other in the slime,"

lived and fought that we their descendants may realize ourselves in "lives made beautiful and sweet," through all unlikeness to dragons. It was necessary that every foot of soil in Europe should be crimsoned by blood, wantonly shed, to bring the relative peace and tolerance of the civilization of Europe today. It always "needs that offense must come" to bring about the better condition in which each particular offense shall be done away. For the evolution of life is not in straight lines from lower to higher things, but runs rather in wavering spirals. It is the resultant of stress and storm. The evil and failure which darken the present are necessary to the illumination of the future. Time is long. "God tosses back to man his failures" one by one, and gives him time and strength to try again.

According to Schopenhauer, we move across the stage of life stung by appetite and goaded by desire, in pain unceasing, the sole respite from pain, the instant in which desire is lost in satisfaction. To do away with desire is to destroy pain, but it also destroys existence. Desire is lost where the "mouth is stopped with dust," and with death only comes relief from pain.

Thus the Pessimist tells us that "the only reality in life is pain." But surely this is not the truth. He who knows no reality save appetite has never known life at all. The realities in life are love and action; not desire, but the exercise of our appointed functions.

Action follows sensation. The more we have to do the more accurate must be our sensations, the greater the hold environment has upon us. Broader activities demand better knowledge of our surroundings. Greater sensitiveness to external things means greater capacity for pain, hence greater suffering, when the natural channels of effort are closed. Thus arises the hope for nothingness in which many sensitive souls have indulged. With no surroundings at all, or with environment that never varies, there could be no sense-perception. To see nothing, to feel nothing—there could be no demand for action. With no failure of action there could be no weariness. From the varied environment of earthly life spring, through adaptation, the varied powers and varied sensibilities, susceptibilities to joy and pain as well as the rest. The greater the sensitiveness the greater the capacity for suffering. Hence the "quenching of desire," the "turning toward Nirvana, the desire to escape from the hideous bustle of a world in which we are able to take no part, is a natural impulse with the soul which feels but cannot or will not act.