Pessimistic Humanism: Extinction, Entropy, and Interwar Philosophy

Philosophers have often held that the antidote to despair is hope, and that hope is temporally oriented towards the future. How do such accounts fare, however, when faced with the prospect of human extinction? If we have no future, is our only option to despair? In this paper, I approach this question via an analysis of the ’discovery’ of human extinction, which followed the nineteenth-century theorisation of the laws of thermodynamics. I examine the ‘existential mood’ induced by the concept of entropy through the interwar work of three thinkers: Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and Erwin Schrödinger. I argue that the apparent tension in these figures’ thought between existential despair and political hope was neither contradictory nor accidental. This was because all three arrived at a position that I call ‘pessimistic humanism’. This position regards the opposition between natural processes and human value as the source of humanity’s autonomy, but rejects the transhumanist conclusion that this autonomy is limitless. I suggest that in our present moment, which is abundant with both transhumanist and anti-humanist responses to existential threat, we should take inspiration from pessimistic humanism, adopting a politics of mourning to counter the paralysis of despair.