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By Root 895 0

the proverbial thousand cuts of life’s disappointments. Yet things quickly change for our protagonist. He attributes his bad fortune originally to carelessness. He wasn’t paying attention and then . . . he stubs his toe, flies through the air, and lands on his bottom, spraining the main bone in the tip of his tail. This is unfortunate, but not devastating. But things go from bad to worse. Even though he keeps his eyes open, a green-headed Quilligan Quail comes from behind to nip his tail. A Skritz goes after his neck, while a Skrink goes after his toe. No amount of vigilance can save him. He is surrounded by troubles, and so life creeps up on our poor young and naïve protagonist. He realizes that life is full of troubles and perils, and no matter how much you pay attention and how good you are at avoiding some, you are bound to be bit, poked, tripped, and nibbled. Luckily, he comes across a traveling chap who mentions to him a place, Solla Sollew, on the banks of the River Wah-Hoo, “Where they never have troubles! At least, very few” (Trouble). His prayers have been answered. If he can’t avoid the troubles here, he’ll go to a place where there are none.

Our protagonist is plagued with problems and is offered a chance to leave them behind for the promise of an idyllic life in a faraway land. He has realized that life is suffering, either degrees of pain or its momentary absence that we experience as joy or, more accurately, relief. But no matter what we do we are bound to experience setbacks and disappointments; life is a series of problems. Things look bleak. Our protagonist may even be on the verge of becoming a pessimist.

The Pendulum Swings from Skritz to Skrink

In everyday language, when we talk about a pessimist we think of someone who always thinks things are going to get worse, even though they are already quite bad; as the saying goes, someone who thinks the glass is half empty. If this is all there was to philosophical pessimism, it’d be very uninteresting. After all, life is full of problems; we all know that. We also know life will always contain these difficulties. But the difference between even the most morose of everyday pessimists and a true, philosophical pessimist is that even those people who see life as fraught with troubles may still see it as redeemable. Most everyday pessimists do think that the value of life can be reevaluated and seen to be worthwhile when measured against some other good like momentary pleasures or a religious doctrine of salvation. But a true philosophical pessimist sees life as irredeemable, inherently and intractably painful with no possible way to make it worth living.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is arguably the first and easily the most influential philosophical pessimist. He saw the glass not only as half empty but cracked and full of poison. But his pessimism doesn’t stem from a depressive personality or bad childhood. He is a pessimist because that is the response he finds most appropriate to the nature of reality. Schopenhauer’s pessimism stems from his metaphysics; that is, how he understands the nature of reality to be fundamentally structured.

According to Schopenhauer, the one thing that marks the essence of human life, and all life in general, is the will to life. This will is the unconscious motive force that moves us constantly and unrelentingly onward. It is “a blind, irresistible urge.”1 Our will most apparently finds expression through our choices and attempts to meet goals, but it marks even the most unmotivated among us. Even those poor saps caught in the waiting place manifest the will to life. As they wait for a phone to ring or snow to snow or a pot to boil or a better break, the will to life is acting through them and they are still driven to something; there are always urges. We are always striving even when it looks like we’re standing still. And Dr. Seuss’s books always depict people this way. The characters always want something new, or different, and always better and grander than what has come before. From King Derwin’s oobleck to Morris