Utilitarian Versus Humanist, And Pessimism

Frederick C. Beiser, Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), Ch. III., The Battle Against Pessimism, sect. 3, pp. 68-9:

This rejection of utilitarianism was decisive for Dilthey’s attitude toward pessimism, because he thought that the pessimist’s bleak assessment of the value of life was rooted in his utilitarian ethics. Indeed, in sections 57–8 of the fourth part of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer finds life not worth living because it involves so much suffering, the preponderance of pain over pleasure. All human existence, Schopenhauer argues, falls between willing and its satisfaction. The willing is suffering because we feel all too keenly a deficiency, the lack of something that we need; and the satisfaction, though it happens, is very fleeting, because new needs arise quickly and constantly. If we satisfy our needs too quickly, then we become bored, the mere absence of activity makes our existence a burden; but if we cannot satisfy them quickly, then we feel prolonged discomfort and distress. Schopenhauer further diminishes the prospects of happiness in life by insisting that pleasure is only negative in value: it is only the absence of pain. With arguments like these in mind, Schopenhauer concludes in section 59 that life is essentially suffering. Each person at the end of his life, he maintains, will not want to live it again.

Like many critics of pessimism, Dilthey could not accept these arguments because of the utilitarianism behind them. They all presupposed that the main goal of life is happiness, which is defined in terms of pleasure. But Dilthey believed that a person’s life could still be worth living even if he or she were unhappy, even if their life involved more pain than pleasure. Dilthey was an adherent of that humanist tradition of ethics which sees the goal of life not as happiness but as the development of character, the self-realization of personality. It was indifferent whether this process ended in more pleasure than pain; it would indeed often involve suffering, which was crucial to personal growth. The main champions of this tradition were Schiller, Schleiermacher, Herder, Wieland, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, last but not least, Goethe.

Dilthey’s portrait of Goethe in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung gives a very different rationale for life from that envisioned by the pessimists. Life is not a tale of woe and suffering but a story of self-creation. There is indeed some suffering involved in that story, but it has its meaning and purpose in being part of a broader narrative of self-fulfillment. Of course, that narrative might be cut short by accident or fate; but what matters is that we have found meaning in the narrative as long as it has lasted.