Schopenhauer and His Anger

Abstract

The foremost representative of modern pessimism is Schopenhauer. (The word pessimism comes from the Latin pessimus, worst.) The world and all of life, according to him, have no value whatsoever; this world is the worst of all possible worlds. So saying, he placed himself in opposition to the view which Leibniz had formulated — that this is the best of all possible worlds. Opposing this optimism (from the Latin optimus, best) he proceeded to reject its philosophical foundation, the belief in God. Schopenhauer’s conviction that the world and life are evil is, in principle, atheism — the view that this world can not be the work of an omniscient and perfectly good God.

This is the fifth of the nine essays in the book Ideàly humanitní (Humanistic Ideals) which originated in a series of university lectures. The book, probably the most popular of Masaryk’s writings, was published in Czech in 1901 and reached at least ten editions by 1968. An English translation, entitled The Ideals of Humanity, was published in 1938 and reprinted in 1969 and 1971. Another English version appeared under the title Humanistic Ideals in 1971. The selected essay is typical of Masaryk’s continuous struggle against philosophical pessimism; an article attacking Schopenhauer’s pessimism is known to have been offered by Masaryk to a Czech journal already in 1875.