Philosophical Pessimism and the Heterogeneity of Suffering

This paper explores the relationship between suffering and pessimism in its philosophical forms. I argue that the heterogeneity of both of those concepts means that there are no simple relations between them. One can trace several distinct relationships between (forms of) suffering and (varieties of) philosophical pessimism. Suffering can be evidence for one’s pessimistic judgments, or feature among the bad-making features of human life, but also be a consequence of adopting pessimism. Indeed, one risk in being philosophically pessimistic is that it can be contribute to our suffering, whether by disrupting our agency, undermining our convictions about the value of our own existence or that of humankind, or by contributing new negative emotions and experiences. If so, scholars working in philosophy of suffering and on philosophical pessimism have much work to do in cataloguing the variety of ways of becoming and being pessimistic and tracing their relations to forms of suffering.