Concept
Pessimism
Overview
Pessimism is a mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is "Is the glass half empty or half full?"; in this situation, a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty, or in extreme cases completely empty, while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task. Your own studies have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our daily…
William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
States what Pessimism is; the author is tied to Pessimism in the knowledge graph.
We can thus guess where the great note of interrogation concerning the value of existence had been set. Is pessimism _necessarily_ the sign of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and weakened instincts?--as was the case with the Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us "modern" men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of _strength_? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Names Pessimism several times; the book is titled for Pessimism.
The pessimism of _doubt_ (shyness in regard to everything fixed, in regard to all grasping and touching). The psychological conditions which belong to these different kinds of pessimism, may all be observed in a lunatic asylum, even though they are there found in a slightly exaggerated form. The same applies to "Nihilism" (the penetrating feeling of nonentity). What, however, is the nature of Pascal's moral…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Names Pessimism several times; the author is tied to Pessimism in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Pessimism
- Albert Schweitzer
- Georg Simmel
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Zhuangzi (book)
- Emil Cioran
- Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Eugene Thacker
- Al-Ma'arri
- Wincenty Lutosławski
- F. C. S. Schiller
- Nikolay Lossky
- Branislav Petronijević
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- George Orwell
- Genetics
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Al-Ghazali
- Antinatalism
- Industrial Revolution
- Neologism
- Jesuits
- Giambattista Vico
- James Lovelock
- Suicide
- Kali Yuga
- Ecological economics
- Metaphysics
- The Guardian
- BBC
- Western culture
- Worldview
- Nihilism
- Ontology
- Welfare state
- Oswald Spengler
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Ecological economics.