One pursuit that has typically occupied the interests of moral philosophers is the attempt to identify the nature of the good life: Which things make a life go well? Candidates commonly include pleasure, knowledge, virtue, meaningfulness, autonomy, achievement, friendship, and others. It is often taken for granted, however, that whatever constitutes the good life, these things are widely achievable. This may be thought, as it was by many humanists of the Enlightenment, to be enabled by continued scientific and philosophical progress. It may also be thought, as it was by many Scholastics and early moderns, to be made possible by the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving deity who ensures that the world is conducive to our flourishing and that things will inevitably work out for the best. On each version of this view, the values taken to determine our quality of life are understood to be realisable, and so life is generally very much worth living, and the world that exists is on balance something to be celebrated. One of the major controversies that shaped the philosophical terrain of nineteenth-century German thought centred upon a movement to establish that this confidence in the value of life was hopelessly misguided. A careful and honest analysis of the human condition, with all its futile striving and abundance of seemingly pointless suffering, would reveal the pitiful reality of our situation. As Arthur Schopenhauer – the primary initiator of the controversy – contrastingly claimed: “we should be sorry rather than glad about the existence of the world; … its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; … it is something that fundamentally should not be” (WWR2: 591–592).

‘Philosophical pessimism’ drew the critical attention of the major thinkers of the time, though many of them are barely spoken of today. This included defenders of pessimism – most notably Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), his first wife Agnes Taubert (1844–1877), Julius Frauenstädt (1813–1879), Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876), Olga Plümacher (1839–1895), and Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) – as well as its many diverse yet staunch opponents, notably, the positivist Eugen Dühring (1833–1926); the neo-Kantians Rudolph Haym (1821–1901), Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), Jürgen Bona Meyer (1829–1897), and Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915); the English psychologist James Sully (1842–1923); and the theologian and pastor Georg Peter Weygoldt (1844–1907). The debates between thinkers such as these, generally lasting from Schopenhauer’s death in 1860 until the turn of the century, generated thousands of pages dedicated to answering the question of whether life was worth living, and became known as the Pessimismusstreit, or ‘pessimism dispute’.

One attentive commentator on this dispute, and a cautious participant, was Friedrich Nietzsche. Many of Nietzsche’s best-known ideas – for example, eternal recurrence, aesthetic justification, nihilism and the death of God, will to power, his critique of Christianity, and his critique of hedonism – emerge against the backdrop, and sometimes as a direct result, of the Pessimismusstreit. The primary motivation for this book is to consider Nietzsche’s complex relation to the pessimism dispute. More specifically, it aims to elucidate and disentangle Nietzsche’s evolving resistance to philosophical pessimism, noting how the details of his epistemic, metaphysical, and axiological commitments both were shaped by engagement with the less known figures within the dispute and formed the basis of his objections to pessimism throughout different points in his career.

Like Schopenhauer before him, Nietzsche was not interested in contributing to merely academic debates largely confined to the halls of university lecture theatres. Though a classically trained philologist, he was by temperament a natural and incisive Kulturkritiker, occupied with the historical evolution of cultural institutions, practices, and values, and how this orientated – for better or worse – the lives and existential attitudes of different individuals within the societies who lived under their sway. More precisely, Nietzsche was above all concerned with the perceived decline of European culture in crucial respects, and how it might be rejuvenated with a reconfiguration of its artistic, scientific, religious, and ethical programmes. For Nietzsche, philosophy could articulate these issues, but at its best, philosophy could play a crucial role engaging this project. As he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil: “the philosopher demands of himself a judgement, a Yes or No, not in regard to the sciences but in regard to life and the value of life” (BGE, §205). The Pessimismusstreit, or ‘pessimism dispute’, was a controversy that attracted Nietzsche’s attention precisely because it was a comprehensive cultural phenomenon. The question of the value of existence and the weight of suffering upon the human condition permeated through every level of German society for the entirety of Nietzsche’s adult life. It included not only academic philosophers, but also artistic and political figures. Pessimism was a popular topic of discussion in the literary salons among high bourgeois and aristocrats,Footnote ¹ but also among members of the middle and working classes, as well as students in various stages of education.Footnote ² So deeply embedded was the topic of pessimism in the social consciousness of the age that in his Der Geschichte der Philosophie, Windelband claimed that it gave rise to “an unlimited flood of tirades of a popular philosophical sort, and for a time … completely controlled general literature”.Footnote ³

The pessimism dispute took place in a context of especial socioeconomic and political upheaval in Germany. This included, inter alia, fatal cholera epidemics, the Austro-Prussian war or Deutscher Bruderkrieg of 1866, and the economic ‘Founder’s Crash’ (Gründerkrach) of 1873. But more generally, this period saw widespread social stratification and inequality following rapid industrialisation, in turn raising the persistent ‘social question’ (die soziale Frage) or ‘worker’s question’ (die Arbeiterfrage). This question largely concerned how, if it all, the mass immiseration of the working classes could be alleviated without incurring social and economic regression; immiseration that contributed to the discontent that drove the 1848 revolutions. For a view so many found to be highly counter-intuitive, it is unsurprising that a popular response to pessimism, as we shall see, was to take these historical events to be largely causally responsible for the rise in popularity of pessimistic thinking, as if it were solely a product of a mood – or at worst, a pathology – shaped by socioeconomic misfortune.Footnote ⁴ However, to avoid blatantly begging the question against pessimism, one must consider the intellectual climate the dispute took place under in order to fully appreciate the precise nature of pessimism as a problem warranting serious thought.

It was not until the end of the 1860s that the term ‘pessimism’ took on a relatively fixed meaning as the claim that life is not worth living, that non-existence is preferable to existence. The most widely discussed justification for this thesis was grounded in the distribution, kind, and copious amounts of gratuitous suffering that there is, and always will be, in the world. Of course, suffering was nothing new in the nineteenth century – all were aware of the various miseries endured in past centuries, be they natural disasters and diseases or human practices: war, oppression, and subjugation. One of the things that was new to this social context, however, was the observable decline of theism as an intellectually tenable position, as well as the beginning of the erosion of traditional religion as a necessary social institution. Previously, there had been consolation that despite all of the suffering, misery, and evil in the world, such things are part of a divine plan in which good would eventually triumph over evil, and one’s struggles would be redeemed and compensated for in an afterlife. But from the mid to late eighteenth century onwards, suspicions about theistic and religious assumptions provoked open challenges to them, challenges both serious and numerous. These included:

1. (1) David Hume and Immanuel Kant’s powerful critiques of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and their respective demonstrations of the poverty of unrestricted metaphysical speculation more broadly.Footnote ⁵

2. (2) The explosion of progress in the empirical sciences, giving new vindication to earlier materialist reductions or eliminations of phenomena such as the immortal soul, the afterlife, free will, God, and morality. This growing explanatory power was seen to be a promising alternative to the relatively stagnant quarrels among theologians over tired medieval arguments.

3. (3) Naturalistic accounts of scriptures in the rapidly advancing field of philology, exposing them as (often contradictory) products of interwoven human cultures.

4. (4) The emergence of the field of anthropology, revealing to Europeans a far greater diversity of religious beliefs and values in the world than they presupposed. Among other things, this triggered a loss of confidence in the idea that the Judeo-Christian tradition could itself withstand the same sociopsychological debunking strategies often used to denounce other, ‘heathen’ religions.

5. (5) In the 1860s, the widespread acceptance of Darwinian theories of evolution by natural selection, which mattered for at least two major reasons: (i) it offered a wholly naturalistic mechanism to explain in greater detail the origins and development of complex life-forms, and (ii) it concurrently revealed the systematic and pervasive nature of competitive striving and suffering in the animal world, making a benevolent creator much more difficult to take seriously as a hypothesis.Footnote ⁶

These events contributed to a seismic shift in the reputation of theism and traditional religion in German thought. Appearing to many on the brink of collapse, their old narratives about the reasons for human suffering quickly lost persuasiveness. In this respect, the question of the ‘value of life’ is one that Schopenhauer, to his credit, re-introduced and re-configured in a way that made it relevant to the concerns of his contemporary secular audience. Why should we, as vulnerable as we are to the hostilities of life, and – following the Kantian destruction of metaphysics – for no purpose we could in principle know, continue to prefer existence to non-existence?

This is not merely a theoretical question reserved only for the academy, but a deeply human puzzle. Schopenhauer referred to this question as “the puzzle of existence” (das Rätsel des Daseins), the identification of which Nietzsche admiringly attributes to Schopenhauer’s “unconditional and honest atheism” (GS, §357), or what he saw as a form of courage in being the first to think through the real practical consequences of abandoning belief in the God of classical theism. It is to this intellectual contribution that we can trace much of Schopenhauer’s tremendous influence, not just in philosophy, but perhaps especially in the arts.Footnote ⁷ This is Nietzsche’s starting point, as much as it was for many others in the pessimism dispute. Operating in the context of the Pessimismusstreit, Nietzsche sought to do two things:

1. (1) The Normative Aim: To map out the evaluative and practical-existential implications of the death of God, to uncover pessimism’s relation(s) to other cultural-philosophical phenomena (e.g., nihilism, degeneration), and to determine whether and how pessimism can be resisted, and, more positively, life affirmed.

2. (2) The Meta-Analysis: To determine whether those taking part in the Pessimismusstreit – both those who claim to be followers of Schopenhauer in their pessimism and those seeking to refute it – have genuinely understood Schopenhauer’s key diagnosis about life and its practical-existential implications.

Each of these aims is to be investigated in this book as part of an attempt to explore Nietzsche’s broader response to the pessimist’s challenge: Is life something worthy of praise and affirmation, or condemnation and renunciation? The extent of Nietzsche’s interest in responding to this challenge is an unsettled matter in the secondary literature. On one end of the spectrum, some suggest that Nietzsche quickly moves beyond the question of pessimism completely after distancing himself from Schopenhauer and Wagner in the mid to late 1870s. Frederick Beiser, for example, claims that the problem of pessimism “ceased to be a central concern to Nietzsche after 1878”.Footnote ⁸ There is some justification for this view: as early as 1873, just a year after publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche privately disparages the pessimism dispute as a “priestly squabble” (Pfaffenstreit) (eKGWB/NF, [1873]: 29 [230]). More explicitly in Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche writes: “Away with these tedious, worn-out words ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’. Everyday there is less and less cause to use them; only babblers still cannot do without them” (HH, §28). His seeming frustration with philosophical pessimism only grows into outright hostility in the 1880s.

On the other end of the spectrum, some claim that the question of the value of life sustained Nietzsche’s interest as an animating feature of his philosophy. For example, Brian Leiter writes: “There are relatively few claims about Nietzsche that are uncontroversial, but I hope this one is: Nietzsche was always interested in responding to that Schopenhauerian challenge [i.e., why prefer life to non-existence?], from his earliest work to his last. And the animating idea of his response also remains steady from beginning to end.”Footnote ⁹ Paul Katsafanas similarly writes that it is “uncontroversial that Nietzsche is gripped by the Pessimism debates”.Footnote ¹⁰ This, too, has a weight of evidence behind it.

Taken in isolation, passages that express Nietzsche’s frustrations toward pessimism can appear as an abandonment of interest in the issue. But this would obscure two major distinctions. The first is Nietzsche’s attitude towards the pessimism dispute, on the one hand, and pessimism-proper (i.e., Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of life’s meaning), as he conceives of it, on the other. The likes of Hartmann, Mainländer, and Bahnsen – as well as their opponents such as Dühring – are frequently the subject of scorn and/or ridicule by Nietzsche in the 1880s. This is partly because he sometimes appears to take the entire Pessimismusstreit to be premised upon a shallow distortion of Schopenhauer’s insight, as if the value of life was determined by a mere utilitarian-style balance sheet tallying pleasures and pains. While Nietzsche rejects that, for reasons we shall come to see, he maintains a significant respect for both Schopenhauer and his pessimism, despite aiming to resist its conclusions and practical consequences. A second crucial distinction overlooked by taking passages such as HH, §28 in isolation is between the types of pessimism he rejects, and Nietzsche’s own endorsement of a kind of pessimism that he calls a “pessimism of strength” (Pessimismus der Stärke) or “Dionysian pessimism” (dionysischer Pessimismus). Nietzsche is adamant that this form of pessimism, partly characterised by a revaluation of suffering as something to be welcomed, is intended as the antithesis and counter-ideal to the form of it defended hitherto (see GS, §370; BGE, §44, §225; eKGWB/NF [1887]: 10 [21]). Thus, as it shall be argued here, the more well-supported interpretation is that Nietzsche does not abandon interest in the problem of pessimism but instead refines its focus.

There is additional, biographical evidence in favour of the view that Nietzsche sustains his interest in philosophical pessimism throughout his writings. Despite his outward disdain for the pessimism dispute and its primary combatants, Nietzsche nonetheless continued to acquire and read major texts dedicated to the issue well into the 1880s. For instance, in 1883 Nietzsche intensively read Hartmann’s Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (1879). He owned Bahnsen’s Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt (1880–1882). He also acquired the French translation of Sully’s Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (1882), and Plümacher’s Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1884), both of which were significantly annotated by Nietzsche.Footnote ¹¹ This stands in tension with the view that Nietzsche loses interest in the problem of pessimism in his mature works. Nietzsche’s continual immersion in the texts of the major philosophical controversy of his day also speaks against a common perception of him as not widely read in philosophy. One commentator, for example, writes that “[a]lthough Nietzsche thought of himself as a philosopher from the early 1870s on, he rarely read any of the technical literature of philosophy. His knowledge of philosophical classics – apart from Plato – came mainly from compendia on the history of philosophy.”Footnote ¹² While it is true that Nietzsche did not read some texts often considered part of the ‘philosophical canon’, the technical literature of philosophy that defined his era was something Nietzsche paid careful attention to. Further grounds for a rejection of this interpretive trend can be acquired once one acknowledges that many of the arguments in the pessimism dispute were informed by, or overlapped with, those in the emerging literature in the adjacent major philosophical controversy of the day: materialism. This view – the view that all facts are reducible to physical processes, that all that exists is matter in motion – found its most prominent defenders in the likes of Ludwig Büchner, Karl Vogt, Eugen Dühring, and Ludwig Feuerbach, amongst others. Nietzsche read works by all of these materialist thinkers, as well as many of their most prominent opponents, the neo-Kantians.Footnote ¹³ As we shall see, their influence on Nietzsche’s thinking about pessimism is apparent in a number of places.

Despite Nietzsche’s persistent and evolving remarks about pessimism through his career as a writer, remarkably little has been written about his place in the Pessimismusstreit. A number of articles have been written about aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism, but they near-uniformly maintain an exclusive focus on his relation to Schopenhauer.Footnote ¹⁴ There are understandable reasons for this. First, Nietzsche was first exposed to pessimistic thought via Schopenhauer, and he retained respect for his ‘great teacher’ in a way entirely at odds with his dismissive view of subsequent pessimists like Hartmann and Bahnsen (two thinkers who, nevertheless, happened to be among Nietzsche’s earliest published commentators).Footnote ¹⁵ Second, a significant portion of Nietzsche’s engagement with the thought of the post-Schopenhauerian pessimists takes place in his notebooks and correspondence, and so is easy to miss if one tries to trace Nietzsche’s views on pessimism with sole attention to the published texts. While this does not licence free use of isolated Nachlass passages, it does mean that they can be useful in giving additional context to what Nietzsche chooses to publish about pessimism and when. Third, Nietzsche rarely reveals which writings have influenced him, when he is borrowing an argument from someone else, or when it is purely his own. This is especially the case when he is intellectually indebted to those with whom he fundamentally disagrees and to whom he shows hostility. Any comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s claims about pessimism must take account of these difficulties.

These three reasons explain why the secondary literature on Nietzsche’s analysis of pessimism has tended to exclusively focus exclusively on his understanding of Schopenhauer. In this book I attempt to show that this approach is too narrow, and conceals the nuances of Nietzsche’s philosophical development over the course of his writing. While Nietzsche often writes disparagingly of other participants in the pessimism dispute, he was often deeply influenced by their ideas, and continued to develop and refine his views in dialogue with them.

The only detailed study of the pessimism controversy in the Anglophone world – Frederick Beiser’s landmark 2016 work Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 – omits Nietzsche completely, instead focusing on the relatively less known figures in the dispute, primarily Hartmann, Bahnsen, Mainländer, Taubert, Frauenstädt, and Plümacher. This omission is quite deliberate. As Beiser notes:

In general, I agree with Beiser’s diagnosis of the state of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship, at least in relation to questions concerning the value and meaning of suffering. The project of this book is to attempt to take up the task that Beiser calls for, and to place Nietzsche’s philosophical engagement with pessimism in its proper historical context. What this will reveal is that Nietzsche is a less original thinker in some areas than he is typically thought to be. But this conclusion is far from intended to disparage Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy. On the contrary, it aims to situate his philosophical contributions in their appropriate context, without knowledge of which his claims can look absurd and ostentatious. The attempt to attribute hyper-originality to Nietzsche has the unfortunate effect of making him appear to make outrageous and implausible proclamations – for example, about ‘eternal recurrence’, ‘intoxication’ with art, ‘craving suffering’, and ‘life affirmation’ – seemingly plucked from thin air. This way of reading him is particularly common in Anglophone commentary because much of it divorces him from the ongoing debates he was engaged in. It is thus unsurprising that, even to this day, in Anglophone circles Nietzsche still often remains as somewhat of a philosophical ‘bogeyman’, useful only to represent an extreme and implausible position; this is particularly true in discussions of Nietzschean ethics. Such a view is rarely expressed by those with an understanding of his real intellectual context, and the existing philosophical problems he was concerned to respond to. As I shall argue, Nietzsche is a highly original thinker, but this lies not in ideas such as eternal recurrence, nihilistic resignation, or aestheticism per se, but in his particular spin on them, and his peculiar combination of positions within the pessimism dispute.

To my knowledge, there is currently only one book-length treatment of Nietzsche’s engagement with the pessimistic tradition in the English-speaking world: Tobias Dahlkvist’s Reference Dahlkvist2007 doctoral dissertation “Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism: A Study of Nietzsche’s Relation to the Pessimistic Tradition: Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Leopardi”. This rigorous inquiry does much to illuminate the influences upon Nietzsche’s thought. But as will become clear, my own interpretation of the evolution of Nietzsche’s engagement with pessimism differs in key respects. Perhaps, most notably, Dahlkvist’s study omits sustained critical attention to Nietzsche’s middle period of the late 1870s, a period that, I argue, contains some of the most important philosophical developments in Nietzsche’s thinking that lead to his mature critique of pessimism in the 1880s.Footnote ¹⁷ These developments include his radical turn towards a broadly naturalistic and decidedly anti-metaphysical methodology, largely as a result of his readings of Dühring and Paul Rée. In this period, Nietzsche profoundly changes his attitudes towards religion, art, and science, and their respective capacities for dealing with the problem of suffering. As we shall see, he ends up defending a naturalised neo-Kantian position that criticises pessimism on the grounds that insofar as it attempts to make an evaluative judgement about life as such, it goes beyond our epistemic boundaries, the limits of which are set by elements of our own drive-based cognition. While this kind of ‘frame of reference’ argument is retained throughout the remainder of Nietzsche’s writing, his views on the power of art and science again change, and radically revert to a position more clearly present in the early 1870s, giving primacy to art as the most stable protective means against pessimism and existential collapse.

Instead of conceiving of Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism in the mature works as a decisive singular affair, I argue that it is best as considered as constituted by three distinct categories of argument, categories that were already prevalent in the nineteenth century:

1. (1) Arguments to demonstrate that pessimism depends upon mistaken premises

2. (2) Arguments to demonstrate the negative consequences of widespread belief in pessimism

3. (3) Arguments to expose the dubious origins of pessimistic belief.

From the 1880s onwards, Nietzsche makes arguments of all three kinds: (i) that pessimism depends upon a hedonic evaluative standard, yet hedonism is false; (ii) that pessimism would lead to both nihilistic resignation and cultural decline; and (iii) that pessimism is itself rooted in, and expressive of, decadence, exhaustion of the will, and an all-encompassing desire for revenge. These arguments are philosophically sophisticated and build upon existing debates in the pessimism dispute. They form the basis of Nietzsche’s proclamation in his curious autobiography Ecco Homo that he earns the title of “the most extreme opposite and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher” (EH, ‘Books: BT’: §3). However, they have yet to be disentangled and fully appreciated in the literature. These critiques are in some ways interlinked, but critiques (i) and (iii) also do not obviously sit well together. Part of the task of this book is to address these issues.

I have touched upon Nietzsche’s intellectual context for thinking about pessimism with the decline of theism, as well as the social context in the wake of sociopolitical turmoil and the ‘worker’s question’. These are both important and Nietzsche often reflects upon both. But there is also a personal context to consider. When Nietzsche considers the nature of suffering and how it might be possible for some people to cultivate an affirmative attitude towards it, he was not pontificating from a distance: he lived it, such was his intimate experience with life-long, and often debilitating, physical ailments. These included partial blindness, persistent vomiting and insomnia, chronic fatigue, and crippling migraines. But there were also psychological afflictions, such as depressive episodes triggered by social isolation, abandonment, the early death of his father and brother, and dashed hopes. Nietzsche similarly reflects on how some of his darkest periods of suffering were causally related to his disciplined periods of intense writing and creativity (e.g., EH, ‘Clever’: §1, §2). It is likely partly due to the personal context that Nietzsche’s analysis of suffering is multifaceted. Though it is often overlooked, Nietzsche does not treat ‘suffering’ (Leiden) – or sometimes ‘pain’ (Schmerz) and ‘displeasure’ (Unlust) – as if it were a monolithic concept for which single, blanket appraisals can be given. On the contrary, he is attentive to the variety of types of suffering common to human experience. Some of these are typical physiological facts: fatigue, illness, bone fractures, infections, dementia, hunger, aches, dehydration, and so forth. Others are psychological: stress, anxiety, fears and phobias, grief, boredom, insecurity, and so forth. Some in the latter category that especially interest Nietzsche include suffering from the cruelty of others or an internalised cruelty towards ourselves (GM, III: §15); suffering from mental fatigue and exhaustion from failing to control an unharmonious set of powerful impulses (BGE: §208; TI, ‘Anti-Nature’: §2); suffering from ceaseless striving to attain our desired ends (GM, I: §13; eKGWB/NF [1888]: 14[174]); suffering from the depressive effect of pity, making the suffering of the pitied ‘contagious’ (A, §7; GS, §338); suffering from a pent-up desire for revenge, or ressentiment (GM, I: §10; HH, §60); and existential suffering from “the problem of … meaning”, namely, there being “no answer to the question ‘why do I suffer?’” (GM, III: §28; BT, §7).

For Nietzsche, it is evident that not every type of suffering is caused in the same manner: in some ways he takes us to be sufferers by nature – that is, as a result of our fundamental physiology and psychology – and in other ways we suffer because of contingent sociohistorical facts (e.g., wars, economic inequalities, being betrayed, being in unreciprocated love). Moreover, it is evident that Nietzsche also does not think that every type of suffering can appropriately be evaluated in the same way. While he clearly takes the suffering involved in striving to achieve noble goals to have under-appreciated value (e.g., BGE, §225), Nietzsche does not think this will necessarily be valuable for just anybody, nor that other kinds of suffering – for example, suffering from a lack of existential meaning – are things to be welcomed. These distinctions will be of relevance to Nietzsche’s analysis of a view such as pessimism, the predominant strands of which harness the amount of suffering in the world as a reason to condemn it. Indeed, it is precisely an inattentiveness to the nuances of suffering that forms the basis of one of Nietzsche’s critiques of pessimism, particularly of Hartmann’s variety.

In pursuing the goal of illuminating these critiques and appropriately situating Nietzsche within the context of the Pessimismusstreit, I also hope to provide further ways of thinking about other key Nietzschean themes. As I shall argue, many of his best-known philosophical themes either (1) play a significant part in forming Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism or (2) are themselves significantly informed by Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism. Of the former, this includes his naturalism, his critique of metaphysics, his drive-psychology, eternal recurrence, and his account of aesthetic experience. Of the latter, this includes his critique of morality, his deconstruction of Christianity, and his positive ethical program. These themes, of course, emerge at different times in Nietzsche’s writing. His corresponding thoughts about pessimism were thus constantly evolving, and it is not surprising that they came under strain at times while Nietzsche was working out his mature views and rethinking his philosophical (and sometimes personal) allegiances. For this reason, to fully appreciate the development of Nietzsche’s attitudes towards philosophical pessimism, it is necessary to proceed chronologically. Part I deals with the early Nietzsche and his context from the 1860s to the mid 1870s; Part II deals with his thought in the late 1870s after breaking with Wagner; and Part III deals with Nietzsche’s mature critiques of pessimism in the 1880s.

Chapter 1 sets the appropriate context for Nietzsche’s engagement with pessimism by distinguishing between different forms of pessimism and identifying the form Nietzsche is responsive to. This is the thesis that came to define the pessimism dispute: life is not worth living; non-existence is preferable to existence. The chapter then considers a handful of arguments for this view, noting some strategic differences between Schopenhauer and the later pessimists. The final part of the chapter explores the presence of pessimistic belief in human culture and history, particularly its manifestation – as Schopenhauer conceived it – in major world religions, and its manifestation – as Hartmann conceived it – in the worldviews of key figures in the history of philosophy. These proposals by Schopenhauer and Hartmann will be crucial to understanding Nietzsche, insofar as they form the background for his similar associations of pessimism with Christianity, Buddhism, Socrates, and Kant.

Chapter 2 aims to identify and chart Nietzsche’s views on philosophical pessimism from the mid 1860s to the mid 1870s, noting the many influences upon his early thought. It makes use of his correspondence and notebook passages to track an early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and pessimism, though contrary to a dominant interpretation, never a wholly uncritical endorsement of it. The chapter then gives an analysis of pessimistic themes in The Birth of Tragedy, with particular attention to Nietzsche’s unique version of the established ‘problem of quietism’, or the problem of how to resist resignation from life if suffering is such a pervasive phenomenon. After exploring his early account of ‘aesthetic justification’, the chapter ends with attention to the Untimely Meditations, where Nietzsche shows early concern for the problem that suffering may require a meaning in order to be bearable, and how cultural excellence may assign it such a meaning.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore a number of radical changes in Nietzsche’s approach to philosophical pessimism in the so-called middle period of his writing, culminating in Human, All Too Human. It situates his apparent rejection of pessimism as an empty theory alongside his new enthusiasm for philosophical naturalism, influenced as he was by ongoing disputes between materialists and neo-Kantians. After attention to his critique of metaphysics and his reading of Eugen Dühring and Paul Rée, these chapters identify the radical revisions in Nietzsche’s estimation of art, science, and religion as means of addressing suffering. Chapter 4 ends with an assessment of Nietzsche’s subsequent approach to the ‘social question’.

Of the final three chapters that constitute Part III of the book, each deals with a distinct critique of pessimism that Nietzsche simultaneously makes in the 1880s. Chapter 5 addresses Nietzsche’s new view of pessimism as not really a philosophical theory at all, but rather a non-cognitive state rooted in and expressive of the adherent’s character. This was a popular objection to pessimism, and the chapter aims to establish that Nietzsche offers a unique version of the charge, differing in crucial respects from the likes of James Sully and that of degeneration theorists like Max Nordau. It analyses the normative dimension of Nietzsche’s critique, giving special attention to the concepts of ‘health’ and ‘sickness’ at play. It ends by raising the ‘scope problem’, which broadly, for now, amounts to the following: If this psychological critique of pessimism is sound, how is it that Nietzsche maintains respect for Schopenhauer’s pessimism but not for the pessimism of Hartmann, Bahnsen, Mainländer, and others?

Chapter 6 identifies and investigates an ‘existential’ critique of pessimism. It focuses upon Nietzsche’s assertion of a need to fight pessimism in a new fashion, not dialectically as if it were a philosophical theory, but as a psychological condition or pathology. By considering pessimism’s relationship to the closely associated concept of nihilism, the chapter sets the stage for an analysis of the notorious theory of eternal recurrence, arguing that this is devised as a response to the pessimists, and particularly Hartmann. The chapter ends with a reconsideration of the role of art, and of aestheticism as an alternative to a strictly moralistic worldview.

Chapter 7 distinguishes a third critique of pessimism that Nietzsche, despite concurrently claiming that pessimism cannot be refuted dialectically, grounds in a theoretical attack on one of its key premises: hedonism. The chapter first clarifies Nietzsche’s understanding of the relation between pessimism and hedonism before disentangling a number of his philosophical criticisms of hedonism. It goes on to explicate Nietzsche’s perfectionist axiology, and how this commitment bears upon the relations he sees between ‘greatness’, achievement, and suffering, which ground his challenge to hedonic pessimism on behalf of a ‘pessimism of strength’. The chapter ends by using the analysis to reconsider the direction of fit between hedonism and pessimism in an attempt to solve the ‘scope problem’, identified in Chapter 5.

This study has two limitations that are necessary to appropriately refine its focus, and which ought to be made explicit. First, this project is primarily an attempt provide an accurate analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophical views and their evolution. While I argue that a requirement to succeed in this aim is to situate Nietzsche in the appropriate context, illuminating the influence on him of less-known figures in the pessimistic tradition, this study does not strive for a comprehensive overview of (1) all figures in the pessimism dispute nor (2) all the controversies in the pessimism dispute. Such an overview has already been provided by Beiser in the Anglophone world and by the extensive work on the Schopenhauer-Schule by Domenico Fazio, Fabio Ciraci, and Matthias Koßler in continental Europe.Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, my discussion of the post-Schopenhauerian pessimists is highly selective: I present only those features of their thought that, I claim, significantly influenced Nietzsche’s intellectual development, and/or provide a useful point of contrast for elucidating his own position concerning a similar theme.

A second restriction of focus is that I will have relatively little to say about the influence of Russian pessimism (e.g., Dostoyevsky, Turgenev) and Italian pessimism (e.g., Leopardi) that Nietzsche was exposed to. While this exposure no doubt influenced Nietzsche’s thinking, and work has already been undertaken to show precisely how,Footnote ¹⁹ I take this influence to be supplementary to the particular developmental trajectory that I focus upon in this book, namely, how Nietzsche’s reading of figures such as Eugen Dühring, Paul Rée, and James Sully challenged his conception of pessimism’s formulation, and particularly the specific arguments for its metaphysical (and eventually psychological) underpinnings.

The aims of this book are primarily historical. While I do not seek to provide reasons to endorse the position I ascribe to Nietzsche, I hope that readers may find points of interest with potential contemporary relevance. An explicit and all-encompassing pessimism about the value of life remains on the fringes of philosophy today. Nonetheless, it does find some defenders. In the twentieth century, it was advocated by the Romanian thinker Emil Cioran in his 1973 work The Trouble with Being Born. Perhaps the most notable Anglophone pessimist in the twenty-first century is David Benatar, whose 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence argues from a Schopenhauerian-inspired pessimism to a duty for all to be anti-natalists. As Benatar outlines,Footnote ²⁰ the planet’s wells of misery have not dried up in the twenty-first century. As I write this, just under 6.4 million people have died as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic;Footnote ²¹ Yemen is experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history since the escalation of its political conflict; a conservative estimate holds around 49 million children under five were affected by malnutrition in 2020;Footnote ²² and currently, over 700,000 people commit suicide annually (about one person every forty seconds).Footnote ²³ In 2016, around 24 per cent of all deaths worldwide – and 28 per cent of deaths among children under five – were attributable to environmental causes: air pollution, water and sanitation, increasing heat waves and severe weather events, harmful exposure to chemicals, and more.Footnote ²⁴ In 2019–2020, massive bush fires in Australia burnt alive, suffocated, or displaced an estimated 3 billion animals (counting only terrestrial vertebrates).Footnote ²⁵ All of this is prior to the impending catastrophes resulting from ever-accelerating climate change: the increased frequency of fatal natural disasters, the creation of millions more refugees as a result of vast areas becoming inhabitable, the desertification and degradation of land masses required to produce food for a world population expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050 (and predominantly in areas most vulnerable to the harmful effects of global warming), and the further mass extinction of species.

This, as Schopenhauer would agree, is the tip of the iceberg. But professed religious belief in Europe and North America also continues to wane.Footnote ²⁶ God remains dead, and under these conditions, how should we assess the value of life? Or alternatively, how might we expect people’s affective orientations towards the world to evolve in these circumstances? In the United States alone, the rate of antidepressant use among teens and adults increased by almost 400 per cent between 1988–1994 and 2005–2008.Footnote ²⁷ The use of antidepressants also continues to rise in the United Kingdom.Footnote ²⁸ With such trends in mind, we may be arriving at a time where the question of the value of life becomes pressing once again. If so, there may be no better time to attempt to more fully understand and engage with the innovative thinking about this question that Nietzsche has to offer.