Book Review: Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman, A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture (original) (raw)
Related papers
Pessimism, Political Critique, and the Contingently Bad Life
Journal of Philosophy of Life, 2022
It is widely believed that philosophical pessimism is committed to fatalism about the sufferings that characterize the human condition, and that it encourages resignation and withdrawal from the political realm in response. This paper offers an explanation for and argument against this perception by distinguishing two functions that pessimism can serve. Pessimism's skeptical mode suggests that fundamental cross-cultural constraints on the human condition bar us from the good life (however defined). These constraints are often represented as immune to political amelioration, leading to the perception that pessimism is intrinsically fatalistic and resigned. Yet pessimism's critical function emphasizes the political, economic, and cultural contingency of many sources of suffering and crisis while exhorting us to reject and reimagine the social forces that actively harm our capacity to flourish. It also offers an internal critique of skeptical pessimism's tendency to naturalize and depoliticize the sources of our sufferings. These sometimes contradictory skeptical and critical tendencies should both be grouped under the pessimist banner, and we should see pessimism's critical mode as especially valuable to political critique.
Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst
2023
This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.
PRAGMATIC PESSIMISM OR ON THE "DARK GRAY" OF THE WORLD
Cuadernos de Pesimismo, 2022
How can a theory of happiness, based upon the practical use of reason and acquired character, be understood in the thought of Schopenhauer, the great pessimist metaphysic? This article aims to prove that Schopenhauer's pessimism can be better understood if considered, on the one hand, as metaphysical pessimism and, on the other, as pragmatic pessimism. For this purpose, I seek to show that the consideration of Schopenhauer's singular eudemonology is fundamental to fully understand his pessimism.
The Politics of Pessimism (2025)
The New Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2025
Schopenhauer’s philosophy has a complicated relation to politics. On the surface, pessimism is an inauspicious foundation for any sort of liberatory politics and elides more comfortably with conservatism. But a closer look complicates this superficial elision. In this paper, we will be examining these complications and investigating what important insights Schopenhauer can offer for this difficult historical moment (but as Schopenhauer powerfully reminds us, what historical moment hasn’t been equally difficult?). In particular, the relation between Schopenhauer’s pessimism and contemporary movements like Afropessimism can demonstrate perhaps not so much the liberatory potential of Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the Schopenhauerian dimension of today’s radical political critique.
2020
Previous psychological research into pessimism has used different definitions of pessimism; it has also assumed that pessimism will have a negative effect on individuals’ psychological wellbeing and life experiences. This study used a qualitative approach with a social psychoanalytic theoretical underpinning to find out whether there are subjective benefits of pessimism. Five interviews were conducted using Hollway and Jefferson’s (2013) ‘Free Association Narrative Interview method’ (FANI). The study found that there are subjective benefits of pessimism which have not been adequately recognized in previous research on pessimism. Individuals described the place of pessimism in their coping mechanisms, decision-making and personal growth. Pessimism was associated with depressive position functioning, hence psychological maturity. This study revealed the need for a redefinition of pessimism in psychological literature and further research into its benefits.
The Unbearable Darkness of Being and a Toolkit for How We Forge It: Comparative Biases
SpringerBriefs in psychology, 2023
Conceiving of mental health and good adjustment in terms of individuals' accurate perception of the world around them and of themselves seems virtually self-evident. In other words, psychiatry's interest includes analyzing whether we perceive ourselves and the outside world as they are or whether we distort, or falsify, both of these images. Psychiatry identifies loss of contact with reality, delusions, and delusional beliefs of patients that they are someone other than they really are as axial symptoms of mental illness (e.g., Meisner et al., 2021; Zandersen & Parnas, 2019). Psychology as well, until the late 1960s, was convinced that mental health and good adjustment were closely related to realism: accuracy in assessing one's own mental qualities and potential for success in various areas of life or a person's mature, realistic attribution of responsibility for both positive and negative events that befall them. Such a belief was characteristic of both those strands of psychology that were humanistic (e.g., Horney; 1937; Maslow, 1954) and strictly cognitive (e.g., Festinger, 1954; Trope, 1975). This is different; it was thought, in the case of people whose mental health is disturbed, because then the "images" (of themselves, the world) are falsified. And this does not apply only to obvious clinical cases of psychosis but to much more subtle illusions, which are typical for almost all people (and therefore also for us, the authors of this book). For example, the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1954) reveals that if, along with a paltry salary, we have worked on something for a very long time or if we have been in a relationship with another person for years with no apparent achievements coming from our relationship, when asked about the meaningfulness of our endeavors, we will respond in a manner that allows us to maintain a good opinion of ourselves. Instead of saying that we worked for years for a pittance on something terribly boring, we will say that it is not boring at all. Instead of admitting that we are stuck in a bad relationship, we will say that it has its pluses. And all this is only because we retroactively justify to ourselves that "since I have invested so much, it must have meaning."