Dark Matters

This is a brilliant, profound and subtle contribution to the history of ideas, and more especially to questions relating to theodicy, suffering and evil. I have in fact known Mara since she was a gifted and musical child, the daughter of Manec and the late Dr Bart van der Lugt, who will be remembered as SMN chair by many readers, and to whom Mara dedicates this extraordinary study. She writes that his loss gave her a deepened sense of the fragility of life and a heightened sense of gratitude that is woven into her thesis of hopeful pessimism as a philosophy of empathy and consolation.

The origins of the book lie in her Oxford DPhil thesis on Pierre Bayle, a relatively neglected figure in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Humans, and especially philosophers and theologians, have always attempted to make sense of the world and life in terms of some kind of moral order – indeed, this underlies my own book Whole in One – the near-death experience and the ethic of interconnectedness, republished as Resonant Mind, which looks at the implications of unitive experience and the life review where it appears that we re-experience events in a way that enables us to feel the emotions of others involved. Historically, Mara explains that the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism have differing answers to the questions, is life worth living and do the goods of human existence outweigh the evils? Her approach is to examine the moral background of the arguments advanced in relation to our experience of life and suffering, including that of animals. Her historical analysis shows multiple problems of evil rather than a single approach to moral evils, physical evils and the central issue of misalignment traditionally exemplified by the wicked prospering and the righteous suffering. Probing further, this leads to the dispositional question of ‘why the wicked are wicked at all.’

An argument going back to Augustine, who also emphasised original sin, is that suffering is a punishment for moral evils, implying that we are ultimately responsible through free-will. This is reinforced where necessary by the compensating hope of an afterlife where the scales will supposedly be rebalanced. In considering the arguments, Mara insists that we take suffering very seriously, and in this respect part of her originality lies in what she calls a value-oriented (rather than future-oriented) approach to both optimism and pessimism and to their shared concerns relating existentially to human experience and giving rise to an ethical drive involving hope, compassion and consolation (p.12). She employs a ‘hermeneutics of sympathy’ in discussing major figures from Bayle to Schopenhauer, although absent from her treatment are the Scottish Enlightenment figures and Glasgow professors Adam Smith (A Theory of Moral Sentiments) and Francis Hutcheson, who both elaborated a philosophy of sympathy.

A series of penetrating chapters chart the evolution of ideas and responses to the variously formulated problems of evil. Pierre Bayle provides an influential starting point along with Malebranche, followed by well-known and lesser-known figures including Leibniz, William King,Voltaire and the deists, Soame Jenyns, Samuel Johnson, La Mettrie (L’Homme Machine, 1749), Maupertuis, Hume, Rousseau, Kant and Schopenhauer. The reader gains a far more nuanced understanding of the central issues seen through the contrasting optics of optimism and pessimism, also involving the two viewpoints of what Mara calls the creaturely and the cosmic, whereby optimists shift the ground of their argument from the first to the second, from an internal to an external God’s eye view on the universe. Here, ‘the point of pessimism is precisely to prioritise the creaturely perspective’ (p. 95) – originating in our own immediate experience. In this respect, neither side proved capable of recognising the other’s ethical orientations.

Those familiar with Voltaire’s Candide and his poem on the Lisbon earthquake will find his contribution explained in its proper historical context. La Mettrie and Maupertuis objected to Stoic fortitude on the grounds that we are obliged to bear the burden of responsibility for our unhappiness when we may have little control over our mental miseries. It comes down to one’s attitude to the importance of attitude, which is precisely the matter at issue. Hume’s contribution relates to the dispositional problem of evil, and he too was influenced by Bayle, arguing that if pessimism is true, this is the end of religion. Against the proposition that ‘human flourishing is mostly a matter of the will’, Hume argues that ‘dispositions too are a matter of fortune’ (p. 214), and can lead to psychological suffering. The chapter on Rousseau is entitled ‘the art of suffering’ and it is here that we meet another strand of the argument, that optimists tend to emphasise our capacity and pessimists our fragility, raising the question of which philosophy best serves compassion, consolation and hope. (p. 279)

Kant addresses the failure of theodicy in a 1791 essay, explained in the context of his overall philosophy relating to the misalignments between virtue and happiness, crime and punishment. His own scheme opposes God’s holiness to moral evils, His goodness to physical evils and His justice to misalignment, which sounds highly implausible to our contemporary understandings, and indeed Kant devotes an extensive discussion to the Book of Job where he distinguishes between ‘authentic’ and ‘doctrinal’ theodicy – here it would have been interesting to bring in the contrasting reflections of CG Jung in his Answer to Job and his subsequent correspondence with Victor White. Mara argues that even Kant failed to take suffering seriously, which Jung certainly did.

Schopenhauer is the philosopher most closely linked to pessimism and, like Mara’s father Bart, apparently played the flute - he did so every day after dinner, leading Nietzsche to wonder if he was a genuine pessimist. Her discussion is detailed and runs through various iterations over the 40 years from 1819 to 1859 where the central concepts are will and representation. Schopenhauer makes an a priori case for philosophical pessimism, linking suffering to the human condition as such, which he sees as vacillating between pain and boredom, so that nonexistence is arguably preferable to life. He elaborates the concept of eternal justice based on the idea that individual sufferings of the world ‘always concern the one and the same inner being’, prefiguring an idea central to late 19^th century New Thought, although Emerson’s essay on the Over-Soul must have been contemporary. Such an understanding is reflected in our time through the work of Christopher Bache, who would concur with Schopenhauer’s formulation and its implication that a shared will ‘teaches us that to inflict suffering on another is to inflict suffering on ourselves.’ (p. 365) This is also my conclusion from my study of the life review. For Schopenhauer, sin and suffering are ultimately the same thing, which ironically brings us full circle back to Augustine and original sin: ‘we are guilty because we exist.’ (p. 366) Existence is not so much a gift, as a contracted debt. This Schopenhauer to a sense of solidarity with our fellow sufferers in terms of pity, sympathy and compassion, his foundation of pessimistic ethics where consolation becomes fatalism, negating the will rather than spiritually surrendering it, as in the path of the mystic.

The final chapter brings these strands together, showing how pessimism can be a moral source. ‘Theodicy goes wrong’, Mara argues,’when it tries to handle our grief, our suffering, by minimising it’, by shallowing it out. An emphasis on human agency makes us responsible for our happiness and our suffering but by overburdening the will – my own temperament makes me sympathetic to this position, but I also understand its drawbacks when it mutates into blame, especially in relation to illness. Mara argues that ‘we could do with more generosity, more compassion, and especially more sensitivity to other creatures’ suffering in our culture’ (p. 405) and that this can be mediated through the ethics of pessimism leading to an extension of our sympathies ‘as a philosophy of fragility, sensitivity, compassion, and consolation.’ Indeed, she maintains that it is our sympathy that enables pessimists to love life more, in spite of the suffering involved that can also bring us depth of understanding, as in Mara’s own case – hence her articulation of a hopeful pessimism (my view of human prospects) so beautifully shared in this wise, engaging and compassionate book.