The special link between pessimistic thought and utopian thought comes to light in various aspects and ways, as in both traditions a special place is saved for "the hope principle".(1) This principle is manifested in every aspect of the world and at the same time is also the impetus for creation of conditions of thought and life. It is the immanent characteristic of transcendence from the reality of a given system. In Western cultural history, human life was traditionally conceived as looking for its erotic realization in true knowledge as creative desire. The dialectic of desire and creativity, of totality and nothingness, is the Western supreme maxim. In this article, I will present three moments that constitute these dialectics in Western culture, moments that in every historical age have different specific formations.

Being that is concretized through human spirit manifests itself as co-existence between any question and all possible answers in all discourses. Spirit constitutes different realms of self-evidence of different speech communities that are empowered and at the same time are manipulated by systems which dwell in every realm of self-evidence. Each realm of self-evidence is able to produce more than one system and its related ideologies. It is possible for man to replace one ideology with another: aggressive symbolic exchange is part of their coexistence.

At the same time a struggle is also taking place, with its social, economic, and military representations. The polemos is immanent to the ideological struggle. Admissions and changes of heart are possible and do occur daily in between the horizons of the system where this symbolic exchange is taking place. But it is impossible to depart from one realm of self-evidence to another.

This is so since realms of self-evidence are closed and totally strange to each other. And yet all realms of self-evidence and their systems are nothing but manifestations and servants of (alienated human) spirit. Like the Greek Moira or Schopenhauer's Will, Being as human spirit has no aim, meaning, or ground, other than the ones manufactured by the powers that govern the ideological systems and through which the people are also manipulated. Yet human spirit is not absolute reason, omnipotence, goodness, and beauty, as in traditional metaphysics, nor as in Schopenhauer's "will" as substance: spirit and its attached systems are materialized and advanced by human desire and creativity and are reproduced in concrete cultural and social conditions. At the same time it is objectivized, alienated, and transcended from human consciousness, and it becomes the womb of the absolute.

Human beings are creations of their systems. But they are the ones who reproduce systems that govern them, empower them, restrain them, and enrich their potentials of self-realization. As a prisoner of his constitutive systems, man acts that way in this magic circle while fighting the representatives of rival ideological systems, developing and consuming his present system and replacing it with another system that will master him. In modernity this textual process is called progress.

But, sometimes the system suffers a sudden invasion of something totally different and alien to man's realm of self-evidence. Once in a while it ruins the realm of self-evidence and leaves nothing of it but wreckage and forgotten desires and creations. That power is an abandoned part of spirit and yet is antagonistic to its permanent realization in the realms of self-evidence and their ever reproduction. This power is called hope, and it is an anti-power.

Hope is an activity that turns its gaze on what is bound by the present realm of self-evidence that constitutes the given reality and strives to transcendence from the given horizons of reality. On the one hand, these horizons (and what they incorporate) make possible the constitution of any question. On the other hand, the present horizons incubate the germ of possibility of transcending the question and of its annihilation through its collision with the perfect answer. This is the hope for a perfect answer. This is the hope for a perfect answer to all questions, for the end. The erotic hope for a totally different thanatus is carried on the shoulders of possibility, while turning to an un-realized world.

The question that strives for an answer reflects man's eternal home-seeking back to harmonious totality, to nothingness; it is one of the manifestations of hope. There it carries the question away. Hope actualizes itself this way as a concrete negation, an (anti-) political power.

Any question - including the questions of those philosophers who declared themselves "pessimists" symbolizes the hope for the constitution of true meaning, knowledge that is folded in the supreme answer to all possible questions, even if it is extremely remote and its topos is surrounded by thick walls made of skepticism and self-evidence. Symbols of its existence are reflected not so much in the maximalistic utopias as in the pessimistic tradition: here the way to what hope is seeking goes through the walls of the realm of self-evidence, breaking the consensus, and is a cord through which man can hope to haul himself out of the place where he is situated.

One should note that hope is not synonymous with optimism, and sometimes it is its diametrical opposite. That is, optimism emphasizes the confidence and belief in the final victory of the good as part of its tendency to emphasize that the good is already present in the present reality. Hope, by contrast, is free of this trend; it steers beyond reality. Through it, it seeks "home", seeks that which is beyond the given horizons: as if only there will hope find its supreme existence, by its complete annihilation.

Western utopian tradition is rich in structures where optimism is very much emphasized. But there are structures where optimism is completely absent, where hope alone is present and is enclosed in a utopian setting. Such a utopia goes beyond the good-evil dichotomy into the evil-vain dialectic. In this tradition the utopia does not look for Eden as her home, since she remembers that the language of Eden contained seeds of contradictions between human will and Godly imperatives: it was a defected realm that carried with it the birth strain of a creation constituting the dialectic of vain and evil.

In Western culture, man is represented as if he is framed in a world of suffering and never satisfying knowledge; Faustian man is desperate between the hope for total knowledge/happiness - even at the expense of pleasure - and the hope of being transcended back "home". In many utopias "home" is a restoration of Eden or its secular parallel. In others the homeward quest is transformed into optimism as to the possibility of reasonable reforms. In still other utopias, back "home" will constitute a retreat from the public sphere to the individual one, where meaning, if not happiness, can be hoped for, striven for. But to our mind, all Western utopias are united in their quest for what is beyond the Edenic infinity, and in being optimistic about the possibility of progress in the project of re-building the “Tower of Babel” alternative, a "tower" whose infinite summit reaches "heaven”.

Optimism, as is reflected in the religious quest for a totalistic realm of self-evidence (redemption) or its secular version (realization of utopia), looks for something that is in the opposite direction to its presence in the pattern of linear time: nothingness. As Metaphysical Pessimism has shown, only nothingness is able to constitute the harmony for which utopia is starring with no reservations.

For the "prisoners of hope" (Zecharia 9: 12), until this meeting the world (as an unsolved riddle) is looked upon as a jail, but also a ladder up which man can strive to climb, step by step. Traditionally, in Western culture, the "steps" were made of corpses of equations slotted by deadly answers.

Utopia is felt in the philosophical longing for the endof this entire problematic. This problematic has two manifestations: real knowledge and the form of the human desire for power. Power makes possible the desire to organize knowledge and constitute proper social possibilities and structures that will be synonymous with human essence as transcendence of good and evil. True knowledge (which to our mind is impossible outside the context of social and symbolic power) is a precondition of a revolution that will realize the utopian hope. At the same time, the realization of utopia is the precondition of true knowledge. Therefore, inevitably, a pessimistic dimension dwells in the heart of any utopia.

On the one hand, pessimism manifests that all progress is a vain progress, and many will never reach the essence of being or real knowledge and happiness. On the other hand, man already knows (by the wrong arguments) that the way to real nothingness is blocked, and so, pessimism makes possible and expresses hope, the longing for confiscating the lost totality, and he finds it in the world he negates as part of defining a proper Philosophical Anthropology.

The dialectic of pessimism and utopia incubates hope. Both are enlightened by the totality that dwells beyond the (present) horizons, and both are bound to transcend the present by its total negation. Pessimism is directed towards the complete annihilation of life as a problematic in the infinity of the un-ending that knows its impossibility. Utopia is directed towards the total pacification of all contradictions in an un-ending compoundness. The moral fire is shared by the two traditions and, in principle, both can share a ethic and criticize the same moral alternatives in a present that they share its negation. Both pessimists and utopists will argue that the present reality is a foul existence, an unreal one, and they will strive to overcome actuality, or at least they will struggle to transcend themselves out of its vanity.

In this article, we will try to show that from Heinrich Heine and his speech community to the philosophy of Max Horkheimer, pessimism is constituted as an autonomous positive concept, a concept that does not pinpoint the absence of "the good". While challenging optimism and being in conflict with the concept of utopia, pessimism is not the negation of utopia, but the adversary of optimism. This is true not only for the concept of pessimism, but also for the concept of utopia. Utopia, we will argue, is not tied exclusively to optimism, as we will show through the reconstruction of the history of this idea.

The first modern appearance of the word “optimism” was in 1737, and immediately after approval by the French Academy in 1762, the common meaning of the word optimism was used regularly, extrapolating the meaning that Condorcet and the rationalists have given the concept, namely belief in an un-ending progress. The word had already occurred in the 16th century in the frame of a linear concept of time and the concept of progress. In this article we will try to show that today, in the face of postmodernism, it is the reconstruction of the dialectic of pessimism and utopianism that might constitute a locus for the continuous battle over the possibility of criticizing reality, transcending it, and holding on to the utopian project of the Enlightenment.

The concept of pessimism(2) is almost completely absent from current philosophical discourse. Practically, an entire philosophical tradition was expelled from the history of culture, a tradition that was for a while at the center of European philosophical discourse. We will emphasize to what extent the problematic of the pessimist tradition is relevant not only to ongoing Western dialogue, but also to our present day reflections.

With the assimilation of the word pessimism in the conventional usage, it eroded that special philosophical discourse that declared itself as pessimistic. To the best of our knowledge, while considering the tremendous effort in the dissertation industry, a doctorate reconstructing the history of pessimism has not been written in the last hundred years, nor have any other monographs on the subject. The most up-to-date general work on the history of pessimism was written in the 1880s.(3) Naturally, these writings lacked the proper perspective for their evaluation and were unable to analyze later stages in the history of pessimism. Our reconstruction is equipped with the perspective they lacked. We live in an age where traditional philosophical concepts and orientations have lost their strength. The dominating discourses of our culture have other interests and hopes while we take part in this tradition, unable to challenge its philosophical problematic. And yet, in accordance with our theoretical interest, we will try to re-construct the pessimist tradition. We will try to fulfill this task by denoting the richness and the actuality of pessimism for the problems and obligations we face at the present time.

The current attitude is typically exemplified by L. Loemeker who wrote on the issue of pessimism in the American Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Pessimism and its opposite, optimism, are only secondarily philosophical theories or convictions; primarily they are personal opinions or attitudes, often widely prevalent, about the relative evil or goodness of the world or men's experience of the world. As such they vary with the temperaments and value experiences of individuals, and with cultural situations far more than with philosophical traditions".(4) Even among those few who have troubled themselves with the issue, it has been common to think that since the beginning of the century there has been no life in the pessimistic tradition. This is the case of Ludwig Marcuse(5) and Beata Szymanska, who wrote that "The modernist dispute over pessimism is now a historical and antiquated discussion".(5)

The dominant attitude of the present generation to the problematic of the concept of pessimism is already manifested in the view according to which pessimism denotes the evil essence of this world and claims that it would have been better had it not existed.(7) This definition suits the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but it does not fit and even contradicts other pessimistic philosophies, like that of Nietzsche. The quintessence of Nietzsche's project is the affirmation of life and saying yes and accepting the sufferings of this world.

We will offer some major innovations: the first through the very re-construction of the history of pessimism, the second in our emphasizing the special role that utopia plays in the history of pessimism, and the third by opening to discussion the main problems that were discussed in the history of (Western) pessimism in light of its last stage, at the center of the postmodern discourse.

We will try to re-construct the history of pessimism using two criteria: those thinkers who saw themselves as pessimists and declared their philosophy as such, and those whose thought was claimed to be pessimistic by declared pessimists, even if they themselves did not see their philosophy as pessimistic. Such a re-construction of the issue should have synchronic and diachronic dimensions. This is so because of the specific historical garb the pessimist discourse dons in each speech community.

In contrast to the standard reservation, according to which pessimism is the negation of optimism,(8) we will present it here as a fruitful, positive, autonomous concept. In contrast to the arguments declaring that the tradition of modern pessimism has entered its grave,(9) already in the beginning of the 20th century we will show its permanence and denote its relevance to our current philosophical discussion, especially in light of present declarations of "the end of history" and "the end of philosophy".
 

In this article we present six sections in the development of modern pessimism:

1. "Lyrical pessimism"' that saw the world as "evil" in its substance.

2. "Philosophical pessimism", or as it is sometimes called, "metaphysical pessimism", where the discourse is philosophical by its nature and by itrhetoric.

3. "Dyionisic pessimism”, which Nietzsche presented as an alternative to traditional "philosophical pessimism".

4. "Cultural pessimism" (Kulturpessimismus), whichin contrast to Nietzsche's project, did not see itself as the great corrector of metaphysical pessimism, and concentrated on the psychological, historical, and artistic dimensions of human existence. Here reality was conceived as what was called "evil" in the traditional jargon. The common assumption was that there is no crack through which human society can transcend from the present worldly reality.

5. The "metaphysical pessimism" of Critical Theory, which turned back to the tradition of metaphysical pessimism through the utopian project.

6. Indifferent pessimism, which characterizes the era that is sometimes called postmodern. We will try to show to what extent this discourse is loaded with pessimistic assumptions and conclusions, while trying to formulate a tranquil, liberated and good-natured, easygoing attitude. Against their public relations- produced image, the projects of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty and their successors are but a continuation of Leopardi, Heine, and Schopenhauer, not to mention Anaximander, Hegesias, and the other pessimists of antiquity.

The first usage of the word "pessimism" can be attributed to Christoph Lichtenberg in 1776. In the first volume of Schopenhauer, The World as a Will and as an Idea (1819) the concept does not yet appear, and even in the second volume, which was published in 1844, it appears only three times. Nevertheless, in that time were shaped the basic formulations of what was called afterward "metaphysical pessimism" or "philosophical pessimism".

The constitution of a philosophy that declared itself pessimist in late Schopenhauer gave new life to some of the ideas that were held before by the Lyrical pessimists. Before opening the main problematic of the philosophers who declared themselves as pessimists, we should present some characteristics of the composition of lyrical pessimism, which constituted the first stage in the development of modern pessimism.

Still today the wide confusion about the typology of pessimism continues, and it comes to light very clearly in the current reception of lyrical pessimism, which is described as anchored in the mental constitution of poets and not in their conception of the world and the word.(9) Like others, Paul Siwek presents the lyrical pessimism of Leopardi, Byron, Baudelaire, and Heine as "nothing but the pathetic confirmation of the evil of this world, a desperate cry of anguish of the tortured soul".(10)

The lyrical pessimism of Heine, like that of Byron, Baudelaire, Leopardi, Tolstoy, and Kafka, has close ties to the Weltschmerz of early romantics. This element in his thought caused many problems to those evaluating him as a pessimist. The weaknesses of the traditional categorization in the history of pessimism and the urgent need to start this work from its very beginning is obvious even here: not just that from those texts dealing with pessimism the utopic dimension is completely absent, even the categorization of the thinkers that inhabit these categories is totally unacceptable to our mind. Heine's case can demonstrate it clearly.
 

The utopic dimension presents itself in Heinrich Heine's work on three levels.

A. Heine, like other melancholic thinkers of lyrical pessimism, was engrossed in the search for private salvation. These pessimists were introduced the demand for total transcendence from bourgeois reality to undisturbed freedom and liberated creation, which in the given reality were impossible. Pessimism opened a for them fissure for this transcendence, or at least, gave them the opportunity of struggling for transcendence that is ultra utopic on the one hand, and constitutes the conceptual conditions for lyrical pessimism on the other. After all, utopianism too is nothing less than a struggle for transcendence from repressive reality through its radical re-construction, an effort that is constituted through a total pessimism as to the possibilities of essential change in the frame of the present conditions.

B. The second level on which the utopic dimension in Heine's thought presents itself is in the assimilation of the kernel of the Jewish redemptive tradition in his secularized utopianism, whose supreme manifestation the Germans were supposed to become. According to Heine, the German denotation of the spirit crystallizes "the great intimacy that dwells between these two nations, the Jews and the Germans”, as if they were chosen together for the mission of building the new Jerusalem - in Germany. This locus was supposed to turn into "the homeland of philosophy, the bastion of prophesy and the castle of pure spirit".(11)

C. The third level manifests itself through Heine's work as the partner to the young Marx's way. His utopianism was realized in the demand for social justice, freedom, and equality, and in the belief that the proletarian revolution might realize these ideals. His pessimism, by contrast, was manifested in his conviction that the revolution, any revolution, is determined to be reduced by the cancellation and negation of the supreme human value: the beauty that the great artistic works contain. He identified with the communist utopia but could not believe in the social possibility of its realization by the proletariat, which caused the poets to fear for the future of bourgeois culture while condemning the bourgeois social reality. As a pessimist he stood still in his quest for ideal general redemption or concrete private salvation, and for it he needed the rhetoric of the general positive utopia.

The research literature that categorized Heine as a lyrical pessimist, exposing in his work an emotion that protests against the supremacy of evil in the world, unjustly ignored the centrality of Heine's utopian dimension in his thought. The traditional evaluations of Heine as a lyrical pessimist ignore two main trends that distinguish him from this tradition or that show to what extent this labeling is helpless: first, these evaluations treat Heine as "a poet" and ignore him as a social critic. Disenchanting evil's presence in the world in this case cannot exhaust itself in describing his mental condition, but it should be developed into a re-construction of the concrete and real components and tendencies in the society and culture against which and from which the thinker is struggling. Heine preceded many social critics, even Marx - whom some deem a pessimist(12) and some a typical Kulturpessimist thinker(13), in exposing and evaluating bourgeois society and culture and in denoting the centrality of issues like the fetish of merchandise.(14)

Secondly, for Heine, as for Nietzsche, life stands beyond everything else - pure life, sensual life, worldly life. He sanctified life in a Godless world and preceded Nietzsche in declaring that God is dead. From Heine's view, the recognition of the death of God does not leave man with no purpose - he has a purpose: to be his own master. However, unlike Nietzsche, in Heine's work, by being liberated from God's tyranny, man is also deprived of his strength. In Heine we can identify a special coexistence between a pessimist dimension and a utopian dimension, for example, in his poem A Winter's Tale. In it the world as "this earthly vale of tears" meets "a newer song, a better song, my friends, let's to birth now! we shall proceed right here to build the kingdom of heaven on earth now".(15)

The manifestation of Heine's utopianism in his work does not negate his pessimism; on the contrary, it exposes his original pessimism and shows him as a pessimist. Longing for the lost totality is his point of departure. One can say that all his work is but an outpouring of a quest for a total merger with the beloved other, nature or God. For Heine, evil's substratum is in the very individuation principle. Evil is conceived as based in the essence of being and time, for a person who is deprived of the realm of the self understood that governs innocence. His affirmation of life in "picfrom a journey" is saying "yes" to life and is an affirmation of it just as "a shadow of a dream". Precisely as such, and as a poetic battle, life is seen by Heine as preferable to death.

Heine's religious concept of revolution is to be understood only within the framework of his pessimism. Participating in the other's sufferings is Heine's idea of the highest level of love. From here he demands the revolution and he wants to be its herald and its son - and not from an optimistic conception as to the possibilities open to progress: history does not hold for humanity any essential transformation. For him, self-humor and utopianism were an instrument to overcome "the sameness" that was created as a determined by-product of the total erosion into fragmented beings, individual things. From this concept he was driven to different ways of "retiring back home", between yearning for madness and death through a longing for re-merging in harmonious infinity and eternity. There is ground for the claim according to which Heine should be seen as Schopenhauer's predecessor who had an important influence on poets and writers in the second half of the 19th century that are not regularly counted as part and parcel of lyrical pessimism.

Seven years before the publication of Schopenhauer's The World as a Will and as an Idea, Giacomo Leopardi died, a thinker whose pessimism is far more radical than Schopenhauer’s. Leopardi's pessimism is grounded in a deep philosophy that was forgotten. Leopardi, who today is renowned primarily as a poet, did not occupy himself mainly with prose. For quite a long time he engaged in philosophical pessimism, and philosophy in general, as his main field of interest, work that was forgotten with the expulsion of the pessimistic tradition as a living memory that challenges the conventions of our present realm of self-evidence.

Leopardi's pessimism is important also for the understanding of the history of utopianism in the sense that, contrary to the utopism of Babiff, Bouneroti, and Marx on the one side, and that of Turgot, Condorcet, Paine, Fristly, Franklin, and Jefferson on the other, stand conservatives like Edmund Burke, but also conservative pessimists and radical anti-conservatives who do not negate only the traditional religion and current social structure: they negate with no reservation whatsoever even metaphysical and political optimism of "right" and "left".

According to Leopardi, "everything is vain" and "it would have been better for the world not to exist”; religions, philosophies, and theories are all determined to be no more then illusions, illusions that at their best are potent enough to cause temporal pleasure. Indeed his philosophy has no special status for that matter. In contrast to Schopenhauer, who in his philosophy tried to present "the thing in itself", Leopardi knew that it was impossible to transcend the existing horizons of the present realm of self-evidence. Leopardi knew that it was possible to avoid illusions just by replacing them with other illusions, and "the thing in itself" always stays as an unsolved "mysterious" constituting human salvation as an unbeatable illusion. The most the wise man can make out of himself is heroic tragedy. And yet, he avoids smashing the prejudices of those who still walk confidently in the total darkness. That is so because illusions ("truth" and "love" included) provide them at least missions and (vain) pleasures. Leopardi avoids choosing an egoistic escape by committing suicide, and he chooses to continue suffering the tragic burden in which his wisdom is translated to a moral practice that is based in extreme relativism and explosive skepticism. Paradoxically, this awareness provides the ungrounded substratum which creates the sense for this philosophical discourse that provides a life purpose in the midst of vain existence.

In 1844 philosophical pessimism appeared for the first time in Schopenhauer's texts, and the second chapter in the history of the tradition that we are re-constructing was clearly opened. According to Leibniz, this world is the best of all possible worlds, and evil is totally absent in such a world. Leibniz grounded his concept of optimism in his theodizea. Schopenhauer orchestrated his thought through the total negation of this Leibnizian idea.

According to Schopenhauer, our world is a place where the good is absent.(16) The world is but a manifestation of the aimless and meaningless "will" that can only ensure suffering. That is so because happiness, that stemming from a temporal satisfying of the will, is nothing but an illusion: an introduction to an additional dissatisfaction or untenable boredom. The essence of existence constitutes being as evil, a "Valley of tears".(17) The negation of the will and an uncompromising demand for self-nullification were for him the way for re-claiming man's place in this world, the salvation of the pessimist's soul.(18) The crack in the cosmic closure through which Schopenhauer managed to re-claim solidarity in a "terrible" world is not positive love, as in the Christian tradition. On the contrary, the disgrace to the world (Weltverachtung) is similar to the tragic heroism that afterwards characterized Spengler's thought.

While claiming that all arguments against suicide are very weak, Schopenhauer denounced suicide, even if life was conceived by him as "vain in its nature" and "a comedy". After all, he tried to save Christian morals. For him "the cross is the real aim and the true purpose of life". In suicide he saw a manifestation of egoism, a manifestation of the will, whose control he was not aiming for in this project, but on the contrary, its destraction. Schopenhauer changed the course of the tradition of conceiving "the thing in itself" and "essence" in the West from a category that presented the reality of the perfect and the eternal (and therefore also "the good") to its diametrical opposite: he showed that the highest being, the most real, the metaphysical essence on which the philosophical tradition in the West based itself was its desire for truth (the absolute) which is not also "the good".

The absolute, he argued, is the will, and the will to life is evil since existence is its incarnation and cannot constitute anything but suffering. This will, argued Schopenhauer, is a blind will, with no aim, mission, or meaning. No wonder that Nietzsche and Freud saw in Schopenhauer the starting point of their projects. What Marx looked for in man, who has an authentic will and potential for spontaneous creation in the future solidarity society, Schopenhauer identified as present in the endless struggle of the overcoming of the will. Then, and only then, claimed Schopenhauer, will solidarity between people be real: it will not be valid just for man, it will be directed to nothing less then the entire cosmos, for sharing the other's sufferings also includes animals, plants, and other manifestations of the will to life.

The struggle for transcendence from repressive reality/illusion of reality is shared by both thinkers. Marx sets out from loyalty to the concept of progress and the ideas of Enlightenment, and Schopenhauer from the total negation of these conceptions. The utopia of the maximal pacification of the will and emphasis on the surplus of suffering over pleasure in this world by Schopenhauer, before the utopia of "human suffering" in a society that has liberated itself in Marx's vision of a possible future society, denotes the common characteristics between these two radical philosophers. At the same time, it crystallizes the immanent link between pessimism and utopia in general.

Marx, like Schopenhauer, did not eliminate the possibility of transcendence from the rule of suffering: "The appropriation of human reality"(19)... "is human effectiveness and suffering, understood in the human sense, is enjoyment of the self for man".(20) Marx continued the utopist tradition that strives for the solution of man's riddle within the framework of the good society that can be developed in the future, when society will mature and wilbe rational. Schopenhauer presented a different utopian structure, which is independent of confidence in rationality and does not evaluate the individual through social structures and categories. Both projects are ontologically centered, and in both projects hope is central. For Schopenhauer, the suffering of the individual is the yardstick for evil, and this is equally valid for the Marxist utopia. Yet Schopenhauer thought that an opportunity for transcendence to total appeasement is open. The avoidance of the will is identified by him as the open possibility of avoiding devotion to the will and to life in general, and is first of all the overcoming of the will that constitutes the individual.

This overcoming of the will by the individual is problematic in Schopenhauer's Philosophy, since he conceives the self not as an essence but as an illusion. How can an illusion overcome the essence that constitutes it? Is it not another manifestation of the strange ways the will acts in by constituting man's illusions? Schopenhauer based his hope principle on the strength of illusions.

Evasion of the will's hold is possible, according to Schopenhauer, in authentic art that constitutes an objective dimension, free of the presence of the self. Still, this evasion is not given: it is an object for striving. Schopenhauer did not see that through this crack the self triumphs; the individual signifies himself through it by and for his consciousness, which is nothing but another mask of the will. Beings cannot overcome being itself. For us it is of special importance to denote this link between pessimism and utopia in his thought. The one does not cancel out the other. While acknowledging that consistent utopianism that is free of the pessimistic dimension is free of this problematic that we reconstruct in Schopenhauer's thought in his philosophy, there is a special contribution to the history of pessimism. His individualistic utopianism is more radical than that of the social utopianism of Marx. While individualistic and idealistic, his utopianism contains a cosmic mission, a true partnership in the course of compassion with the other and with all nature.

The history of pessimism from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche developed in two programs: the one pole was scientific, the other existentialist. Both tendencies failed to be liberated from the category of suffering as the essential characteristic of life. Regarding thinkers of the first pole, we will show the utopian dimension in its positive social side. As for thinkers of the second pole, we will show how the utopian dimension is prominent in the context of the individual, an individual who strives for total transcendence from the sufferings that characterize this world. Eduard von Hartman can be their representative.

As a counter-reaction to the historicist crisis(21) and from within it, von Hartman tried to combine philosophical pessimism with the Hegelian tradition and with the conquering conviction on the supremacy of science concerning the right to speak on behalf of the conceivable truth. In contrast to the metaphysical discussion of Schopenhauer, von Hartman pretended to justify and ground pessimism on a scientific substratum through a psychological analysis of pessimism.(22)

In Kant he saw "the father of pessimism", since Kant provided a solid base for morality and enlightened religion, in contrast to the fragile aedemonological pessimism of Schopenhauer which, according to von Hartman, did not have an ontological or even an epistemological ground, as it streamed out of his private character and personal sufferings. According to von Hartman, by constituting an autonomous moral philosophy, Kant practically negated any aedemonologism and pseudo-moral egoism. By banning any legitimacy from self-centered egoism, Kant included (implicitly) in his philosophy the conception of a possible positive happiness in this world, since the quest for happiness and morality contradict each other. von Hartman argued that even God is a defective and suffering being. Only the imperfection of God can explain the creation of such a world as that which we suffer. This imperfection of God is the cause of human sufferings and God's unhappiness, God that is in no way the Omnipotent being described by Christian tradition. Christianity tries to present God as an eternal, self-sufficient and omnipotent being, but, argued von Hartman, the eternity of God's deed to realize the ideas makes transparent his essential vulnerability, his immanent imperfection.(23)

The religiosity that von Hartman presents is based on the tranquillity of a suffering God who is not omnipotent, all-powerful and all-knowing. Pessimism presents itself in von Hartman's philosophy as a new religion, as a perfection of Christianity, and from that locus he demanded from man the participation with God's suffering,(24) in contrast to the concept of pietas and the participation with the other's sufferings in Schopenhauer's philosophy. Philosophical pessimism, von Hartman claimed, teaches us that in the course of human progress it is possible to overcome suffering, external suffering, but it is impossible to overcome internal suffering that is caused by being itself, like the Hegelian concept of ontological entfremdung.

In contrast to Schopenhauer's pessimism, von Hartman’s does not exclude and negate the concept of progress, a concept that was so vital to the modern utopianism. According to von Hartman, suffering can transform its forms and bring humanity to higher moral levels of suffering, and this is the only possible redemption of humanity that philosophical pessimism can offer.

Philipp Mainlaender and Julius Bhansen, Schopenhauer's students, can serve as representatives of existentialist pessimism. While Mainlaender, like Kierkegaard, denoted the centrality of suffering not just in a historical, religious and philosophical context, but first of all in an existential context, his conclusions differ.(25)

Mainlaender showed that in the absence of suffering, thought is impossible. The condition for an answer is the traumatic existence of a troubling question, the world as a problematic, existence as suffering. Those drowned in self-satisfaction and life in cosmic happiness are unable to bear any new question or any new answer, and they are particularly incapable of creation and self-consciousness. Self-creation through the struggle of self-consciousness is constituted through suffering in the face of the estrangement of the world: the brutal fact of its being not me, or my not being God. Suffering, in such a case, constitutes the world for man and makes possible human consciousness. Life, according to Mainlaender, is nothing but a constant struggle to minimize human suffering and its destruction as, for example, in the effort to trace the perfect answers to questions. The quest for knowledge, which is a reminder of an unsolved world of questions, will always remain, accompanied with suffering and vanity.

As a modernist, Mainlaender acknowledged that the way for the traditional Western and especially Enlightenment's utopia is closed. It was an illusion about which Western cultural history had already lost its innocence. It is impossible to retreat to innocent belief in religious redemption through God; there is no way back to the Platonic philosophical project of climbing the dialectical hill to eternal ideas, to knowledge and other utopias that practically promised transcendence from this world. But Mainlaender did not abandon their goal: death, which they called real life. All unfolding of the will signifies, according to Mainlaender, the quest for self-destruction, for nullification. This thesis is ontologized through the thesis that the first and the last deed of God was creating the dying world.(26) By following Schopenhauer, he explained this trend through the idea of nirvana: not as a self overcoming suffering through Kierkegaardian humor, but through self-conscious nullification, his consistent conclusion from the analysis of the concept of "life".

FSchopenhauer the blind will to life is suffering's substratum. For Mainlaender it is the will to die. The will, in Mainlaender’s philosophy, needs the strain between being and not being in the world of illusion that strives for total nothingness. The omnipotence that was traditionally attached to God is here attributed to the will, whose only mission is nullification of life. But because the omnipotent will is not omnipotent for itself, the transference from existence to un-existence is full of antinomies and self-refutations. Presumably, Mainlaender substitutes the religious idea of redemption through God with the idea of the redemption of the will through its nullification. For, in contrast to his master's philosophy, not all the cosmos is the manifestation of the will. God, or karma, receives the form of body in the entire cosmos, including its individual representations and contradictions, and Mainlaender himself is included. There is no way to decide in this matter, since, according to Mainlaender, no man can transcend from the origins of solipsism, from his bare individuality. For him, the only reality in his life is he himself, and his "self" is nothing but a locus of suffering.(26a)

The consistent conclusion of his was suicide, and Mainlaender realized his philosophy a day after the publication of his main book. He did not see himself as much of a prophet, and explicitly he was not obliged to convince of the truth of his philosophical pessimism. It was an existential decision that is un-communicable and is not reducible to education in principle. But Mainlaender could not bear the suffering of not writing. He could not overcome the need to affect, to eternalize his alternative, as he could not draw the features of the utopian society where there is no suffering whatsoever and reality is completely rational.

A more consistent pessimist was Julius Bahnsen. He understood that there is no place, no hope for personal salvation, as in Schopenhauer's version, or for universal salvation, as in von Hartman's version. Even consciousness of the impasse and the alternative of suicide that Mainlaender suggested is irrelevant for him: there is no salvation from actuality, and within being there is no open door for any hope,(27) no meaning to Utopia. Bahnsen's conclusion is paralyzing and is close to the problematic facing the consistent skeptic.

Consistent skepticism, doubting everything, understood that if doubting all that is formulable is a must - skepticism included - then silence is the only possibility still open. But, unavoidably, this too is a doubtful conclusion, and the skeptic cannot avoid doubting it as long as he continues to be a consistent skeptic. The conclusion must be that it is impossible to be satisfied by silence in life; only total dumbness, death, is powerful enough to save the consistent skeptic from the inconsistency of his system. Regardless of his desire to avoid any system or dogma, his position is no less problematic since it too is nothing but a dogma. Self-murder is regarded as the only consistent conclusion. But even here we see the dogmatic chains from whose deadly philosophical grip even the total skeptic is unable to liberate himself. This is so since he, more than any other Philosopher, is dogmatic in his presupposition as to the reality of the metaphors in the present realm of self-evidence: the laws of logic, the permanency of the concepts that re-present reality, which are loaded with clear meaning, that the skeptic cannot help but accepting, as long as he is a skeptic.

It is the peak of his skepticism that the consistent skeptic accepts suicide as an unavoidable conclusion of skepticism, and he proves to be a dogmatist: he accepts self-murder as a conclusion of his skepticism about possibilities of justification of life. This is skepticism about concepts and conclusions that are regular citizens of rational discourse, from challenging the very possibility of concluding a discourse with conclusions for whose consequences he is willing to pay the highest price. But in order to think - and the skeptic can not avoid thinking - he must use these metaphors; he cannot escape presupposing what his conclusions nullify. What, then, should the skeptic do if not even the silence he imposed on himself, not even self-murder, are able to save him from this aporia?

Mainlaender showed that as a skeptic proves to be a pessimist, the suffering embodied in the skeptics will show that they struggle, and wondering is nothing but a moment of the grand manifestation of the ontology of existence in itself and for itself: that evil is immanent to life. He raises the question whether self-murder will be the suitable answer to the skeptic's problem. This turns out to be the only possible way of escaping the realm of repression of existing symbols and metaphors, as if an outlet to Mainlaender's challenge to man's sufferings and self-nullification was his answer to this challenge. In doing so, Mainlaender showed to what extent he was a dogmatist, since a more skeptical attitude would have opened for him the possibility of acknowledging that on this track it is not possible to prefer death over life, nor even to conclude that one should commit suicide in a world where there is no rational way to prove that life is better than death. Bahnsen found in this pessimism the quintessence of a new morality. The master of egoism and nullification of the private will to life as a ladder to escape the monad in which the individual is imprisoned is in his philosophy conditioned on the struggle for the moral deed in a world that cannot reward him for it, besides granting the very possibility of struggle. Friedrich Nietzsche, who wondered about these questions, found the justification of the struggle not in nullifying life, but in sanctifying life and adoring the will's might.
 

Nietzsche's philosophy is a turning point in the history of pessimism and it opens the third stage of its development. It "prompted by some enigmatical desire, has long endeavored to go to the bottom of the question of pessimism and free it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and stupidity in which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's Philosophy"(28). He moved the pessimist tradition from questions of suffering and evil to the problematic of values. His contribution to pessimism - in comparison with Schopenhauer - he defined as a crucial step forward. He presents himself as Schopenhauer's preserver and de-constructor.(29) In our view, all his thought has to be re-evaluated according to this perspective.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Nietzsche discovered a substitute for the vision of a utopian alternative of "tragic culture", of "the victory of wisdom over science" which is a victory over "optimism" in which he saw the substitute of the modern culture.(30) In Schopenhauer, Nietzsche found the symbol of tragic utopianism: "We look in vain for one single vigorous root, for one spot of fruitful healthy soil: Everywhere dust, sand, torpidity, languor! Under such circumstances a cheerless solitary wanderer could choose for himself no better symbol than the Knight with Death and the Devil, as Duerer has sketched him to us - the mail-clad knight, grim and stern of visage, who undisturbed by his gruesome companions, yet without hope, pursues his terrible path with horse and hound, alone. Our Schopenhauer was such a Duererian knight: he was destitute of all hope, but he sought the truth. We have not his equal to-day".(31)

After a while Nietzsche detached himself from Schopenhauer's Philosophy, but he did not deny his debt to Schopenhauer, in whose philosophy he believed he would find "the earthquake by means of which a primeval force that had been imprisoned for ages was finding vent".(32)

According to our reading of Nietzsche, one should not accept Nietzsche's criticism of the pessimistic tradition(33) as a retreat from philosophical pessimism, but on the contrary, as a Nietzschean way of re-evaluating and developing pessimism. According to our thesis, it is more fto understand Nietzsche through his position in the pessimistic tradition. One should try understand Nietzsche's philosophy as a reaction to the kind of pessimism he annulled in the history of Western culture and as an alternative to it. "Dyonisian pessimism", pessimism of power", he called his utopian alternative to Schopenhauer's pessimism: "the last great event in the destiny of our civilization".(34)

He himself describes the Dyonisian dimension in his thought as one that emerges from his challenging the Schopenhauerian riddle: "At the same time I grasped that my instinct went into the opposite direction from Schopenhauer's: toward a justification of life, even at its most terrible, ambiguous, and mendacious; for this I had the formula 'Dionysian'. Against the theory that an 'in-itself of things' must necessarily be good, blessed, true, and one, Schopenhauer's interpretation of the 'in-itself' as will was an essential step; but he did not understand how to defy this will: he remained entangled in the moral-Christian ideal. Schopenhauer was still so much subject to the domination of Christian values that, as soon as the thing-in-itself was no longer 'God' for him, he had to see it as bad, stupid, and absolutely reprehensible. He failed to grasp that there can be an infinite variety of ways of being different, even of being God".(35)

In contrast to "powerless values", like "life negation", Nietzsche ordered the nullification of everything that is "spirit" and humbles and is affirmation of the desire for "strong sensations".(36) This, as an alternative for compassion, pity and concern for the other that Schopenhauer called for, was represented by Nietzsche as more dangerous and evil than any malice.

In contrast to traditional moral values and ways of evaluating values which, after all, Schopenhauer accepted, and became "a world-denier"(37), Nietzsche called for affirmation of "strong sensations"(38) and mighty experiences.

Like many other German thinkers, Nietzsche saw in classical Greece the model. But the Greece to which Nietzsche referred was not the Periclesian Greece, the amiable Greece of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but the Homeric Greece, "when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, when life in the world was brighter than it is nowadays when there are pessimists".(39) "Nowadays, when suffering is always trotted out as the first argument against existence, as its most sinister query, it is well to remember the times when men judged on converse principles because they could not dispense with the infliction of suffering, and saw therein a magic of the first order, a veritable bait of seduction to life".(40) Nietzsche longed for the returning of tragic life from that kind, but longed for it as a modernist and as a philosopher with no positive-restorative utopia, where the ideal human model is supposed to be reproduced. Therefore, in the returning of real life, he conceived of the idea of life as an artistic creation. Again, in contrast to Schopenhauer, who in tragedy detected the giving up, the leniency of life, Nietzsche found in tragic life a grand affirmation of life, the will for life as creation.(41) His entire utopia is based on his philosophical pessimism: "I call that pessimism of the future, - for it is coming ! I see it coming ! - Dionysian pessimism".(42)

The affirmation of life, despite suffering, was not constituted just against the background of the brute happiness it can offer, despite and through the pleasure it promises via authentic suffering. It was none other than Marx who called it "human suffering" - as against inhuman suffering in the "pre-history" of human society, namely, before the Marxist revolution. Nietzsche called it "heroic" life: "The nose for what we could still barely deal with if it confronted us in the flesh - as danger, problem, temptation - this determines even our aesthetic Yes. ('That is 'beautiful' is an affirmation). From this it appears that, broadly speaking, a preference for questionable and terrifying things is a symptom of strength... Pleasure in tragedy characterizes strong ages and natures: their non plus ultra is perhaps the divina commedia. It is the heroic spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty: they are hard enough to experience suffering as a pleasure".(43)

In life as living art, said Nietzsche, man becomes master of the truth, and he creates the only power that is of any match to the will to give in to life. "Art as the redemption of the sufferer - as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, deified, where suffering is a form of great delight".(44) And here we encounter the utopian dimension in Nietzsche's philosophy: in life as living art, man tastes the taste of himself as power, as an artist. He creates himself and his metaphoric world. Nihilism is revealed as a moment of pessimism. The deconstruction of values makes possible liberation from the subordination to grand goals that enslave man and constitute him while debasing him. Nietzsche annulled these interrelations as an important element of his pessimism. But the rescue from (traditional) values in Nietzsche's philosophy, or the "gay" lack of goals, may also be a terrible and paralyzing discovery for others. His philosophy is a renunciation of the will to values and transcendental goals that fires the creative energy of man and makes possible the self-creation of the great man and his constitution of his world through the distribution of metaphors that draws to them the autonomy of the other. Through the acceptance of his metaphors and symbols by the Other, he turns him or her into an element of his own enlarged ego, and he pushes on in his development towards being a real God.

This is a life or death struggle: the authenticity of one's life is conditioned by one’s ability to destroy the other as a person in himself and for himself. In certain aspects, this project is close to the Kierkegaardian concept of the "aesthetic" man and to the egoistic project of Max Stirner, both of them students of Hegel. The main idea here is that as long as man cannot struggle in an entirely free way toward fulfilling his mission, his life is not yet real. Here the concept of pessimism is very relevant in Stirner's regular use and meaning of pessimism about the possibility that man will not fail in his grand obligation and mission. One should emphasize here that success is not the central point, but rather the very possibility that this struggle should be counted as "success".

In Nietsche's concept of pessimism, it turns out that on the one hand the liberation of the pessimist is a condition of the entire project, and on the other the pessimist is tied to this mission no less and probably even more than the believer is tied to the obligation of loving and serving his God, or the nationalist devotee is obliged to serve the national "interests" and goals. The Nietzschean pessimist is unable to give up his struggle of being God as a manifestation of his self-overcoming as a man. Indifference to God, not acquisition of God’s power, is his endless aim. Without aiming for the "real" human (eternal and endless) mission, he feels he should not consider himself human, but on the other hand he will never realize his aim and will not fulfill his mission as one grounded in vain eternity and immanent impotence while confronting his endless goal. The fulfillment of his mission is immanently beyond the present horizons and beyond his possibilities while he is obliged to transcend and destroy himself. His goal immanently is eternal and endless, and until he fulfills his mission, he cannot be himself, to say nothing of transcending into a super-human condition. He is overpowered by the moira of the word. Nietzsche calls us to be in love with our (tragic) fate and to struggle to overcome ourselves, namely to struggle with our fate to be governed by the aimless moira.

As God created the world in a word, so metaphors are in fact nothing less then the unfolding and realization of the will to power.(45) Nietzsche's pessimism is an ultra-individual utopianism that not targeted at a total solution of the problematic of the public sphere, but aims at challenging the problematic of the grand individual that suffers the brutal fact of being an (almost) autonomous individual. Today we suffer from the historical disappearance of this ideal, which contrasts his affirmation of life as a stage in the final solution of the human riddle as part of the subject-object dichotomy. His affirmation of life was part of the constitution of the pessimist and his value-full world. Today, as we advance in destroying the subject while developing the individual and his world, we are not tackling philosophical pessimism's problematic. We are, rather, entering a new stage in the history of pessimism in which there are no more utopias. Nietzsche's utopia was not one of the final solutions to the human absurd, but a utopia that concerned the possibility of saving the eternal life or death struggle for the suitable existence of life as an artistic creation. This is Nietzsche's answer to Mainlaender's challenge. Thus, the third part in the history of pessimism came to its conclusion.
 

At the end of the 19th century, philosophical pessimism had a fascinating career: dozens of intellectuals declared themselves philosophical pessimists, and hundreds of books and articles were published out of common partnership and mutual articulation of this sort.

By the first years of the 20th century the tide was turning, and scientific work in several disciplines like sociology and psychology inherited the jargon of philosophical pessimism, while proving philosophical pessimism itself as groundless and irrelevant romantic jargon that should be overcome by "mature", "objective" scientific work. Although there was no continuation of philosophical pessimism as a declared and self-conscious tradition, its problematic was very noticeable in the work of a significant sector of the thinkers of that generation. In their work there is an important dimension we can call "pessimistic", since their problematic was the same and was inherited from philosophical pessimism.

One should distinguish texts that exposed the spirit of the fin de siècle from the pessimist tradition of which Schopenhauer, Mainlaender, Bahnsen, von Hartman, and Nietzsche are the grand heralds. Among the texts of writers who did not declare themselves pessimists were many that were included in the so-called Kulturpessimismus. Here one finds much earlier thinkers like Rousseau and Marx. A special place was held here for thinkers like Ferdinand Toenis, Max Nordau, Georg Simmel, Spengler, and Freud, just to mention some of the better known figures included in the cultural pessimism tradition.

It looks as if the pessimist tradition came to its conclusion with the transformation of the metaphysical discourse into concrete, separate scientific research plans through the Cultural Pessimism of the time. Parallel to the wide fragmentation and implementation in ordinary language, pessimism as a concept was drained of all its philosophical content. Here we will try to show the transformation of the Philosophical discourse into specific scientific research projects that implicitly are inherent in and develop the pessimist tradition. While conscious of their liberation from the metaphysical laws in general and the pessimist tradition in particular, these research projects had philosophical foundations and where confronted with the philosophical problematic, which reveals them as the fourth stage in the development of the pessimist tradition.

Ferdinand Toenis articulated two basic socioeconomic structures that are characterized by different socio-cultural relations: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. According to Toenis, the modern form of the German reality is that of Gesellschaft, which is constructed by economic development and the continuous increase in state power. By our thesis, the important component here is that the historical transformation from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is in Toenis's philosophy an inevitable product of a determinist and fatal development of human society in Europe. The Gesellschaft is unique, according to Toenis, in the special role the private egoist sphere plays in it. The development of modern Gesellschaft is represented as an overthrow of the previous space of common understanding, and destruction of man and his interrelations while constantly developing technology. The kind of liberty that is developing parallel to this trend and as part of it and one of its causes is nothing but the freedom for mutual destruction within the frame of personal and class confrontation and exploitation in modern mechanistic society that constitutes itself by manipulating both aggressor and victim for its own interests.

Toenis exposes the mechanisms of the sociological game and shows modern society as an organism mobilized by speculation, calculation, and will for profit. Personal gain and egoism here compose a sole motive for work in this social game that atomizes the individual. ??His preference of passing Gemeinschaft and "organic life, where the participants are taking part in a natural way in the totality".(46) He understood that this trend was unavoidable and unstoppable, a development that had its start in Renaissance times and got a special boost in the first industrial revolution. For Toenis, this was a manifestation of unstoppable destiny. He conceived this reality as evil. We think that until the last stage in the history of pessimism, the conception, like that shared by Toenis, that evil is immanent to reality is the yardstick to evaluate Toenis as a genuine pessimist. This is so even though explicitly there is no philosophical stand in his sociological work. It is also the meta-scientific program of Georg Zimmel, who deciphered the rationalization and standardization processes of the social dependencies. Parallel to the wide fragmentation and implementation in ordinary language, pessimism as a concept was drained of all its philosophical content. Herewith we will try to show the transformation of the Philosophical discourse into specific scientific research plans that implicitly are inherent and develop the pessimist tradition. While conscious of their liberation from the metaphysical jaws in general and the pessimist tradition in particular, these research plans had Philosophical foundations and were confronted with Philosophical problematic that expose them as the fourth stage in the development of the pessimist tradition.

Spengler is usually considered to be one of the representatives of "historical pessimism"(47) and cultural pessimism. Today the regular use of these categories is naive, with no sensitivity to the special stand they had in their time, when they were constructed as an alternative to metaphysical pessimism and were articulated out of a stormy debate that was aimed against metaphysical pessimism.

When we use categories like "pessimism" and "utopia" after Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger, we are aware of the danger of being attacked with the same weapon, and of being accused of a romantic and naive conceptualization for using conceptions that are already overused. The de-construction of these old concepts will help us to re-construct a lost narrative lacks a voice but also a historical context in which its unfolding is possible. By using overused concepts in light of the new context, we re-construct a lost history and challenge the present reality and its legitimate and forbidden histories. Today the forbidden histories are left deserted not so much by the power of direct sanction as by the omnipotence of indifference and the loss of historical sensibility that protect the one-dimensional realm of self-evidence in the modern Gesellschaft. In contrast to thinkers who try to develop new key words and symbols in order to challenge new reality, we are obliged to appose our de-construction of the old concepts to their newly made symbols and keywords and re-construct from the material of their remaining traces the lost history of pessimism as part of defending the remaining possibilities of today's critical spirand its history.

In Spengler's main work Der Untergang des Abendlandes, every civilization is the inevitable destiny of every Kultur that matures and reaches its peak: "Civilisation is the inevitable destiny of a Kultur".(48) Europe, Spengler concluded, is entering this situation.

Like other representatives of Kulturpessimismus, Spengler's work too dwells in the pessimist tradition. Again and again he declared himself a non-pessimist; nevertheless, the basic assumptions of his research plan as well as his polemics that follow it show us to what degree he is a part of the self-conscious pessimist tradition.(49) Spengler and ??Simel could not avoid a direct dialogue with philosophical pessimism. Both wrote books concerning philosophical pessimism, while in the background stands their scientific work as an alternative. We include them in the pessimist tradition not only because of their basic implicit assumptions and explicit conclusions, but also because of their part in the development of the pessimist discourse. They reformulated old philosophical problematic, but essentially were exercised by the same problematic.

The challenges that Spengler denoted were not part of the struggle against the present reality nor did he give them a theoretical shape. He did not believe in the existence of an open possibility to transcend or restructure reality. The challenges that he saw as still relevant were in the artistic realm and in cultural research. As a pessimist, Nietzsche too saw endless missions and challenges ahead of man. The goals that Spengler pinpointed did not exclude him from the pessimist tradition amidst his denial of being a pessimist; Spengler saw that the challenges do exist, but that the "Man" to fulfill his destiny and confront his challenges is not to be found any more.(50)

According to Spengler, the evil reality is not an unfortunate historical mistake that one can challenge. This is an outcome of the circular course of time that entangles an empty spirit, a "Caesarean" era. He understood that there is no place for utopia, not even in its individualistic version. Heroic fatalism seemed to him to be the only gate still open.

Here we do not mean a concept that concerns the possibility of constituting an aim for an individual, since according to Spengler there is no grand plan or value that for it or through it the subject can struggle for what really deserves fighting for. By the same token, for Spengler the possibility of struggling is still open, even in a hopeless, closed world: it is the mission of the real hero, who struggles with no hope in an aimless world. The obligation that one undertakes capriciously manner does not liberate one, but it brings one face to face with reality, with no illusions and without surrender to it. Salvation was traditionally considered transcendence. Now it turns out that transcendence is impossible, and the only strife still possible is the fight of the struggle's consciousness conditioned by brutal reality.

Tragic heroism does not speculate on the possibility of winning the battle. On the contrary, it denotes the importance of sticking to duty, a mission that no one and nothing forces man to take on himself, an obligation with no spark of hope. Tragic heroism manifests that especially in the face of the omnipotence of all the evil that constitutes reality, there is nothing that can break the hero, especially since he recognizes that he will never have the upper hand in his struggle.

As a Job who has matured, he understands that there is no way to understand God and stop the struggle against him since there is no God. Living in a Godless world means for him the absence of a way to murder God, a way to compose meaning, a way to constitute meaning for self-murder or for refusing it. "In the face of this fate, there is only one view of the world which is worthy of us, that of Achilles mentioned: rather a short life full of deeds and glory than one without meaning. The peril has come so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that it is pitiful to deceive oneself... Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must courageously follow the path to the end, as it is laid down for us. There is no other. To endure to the end like the Roman soldier whose remains have been found before a gate in Pompeii, who died because when Vesuvius erupted no one remembered to relieve him. That is greatness, that is what it means to have breeding. This honorable end is the only thing which no one can take from us".(51) At the same time he published "revolutionary" articles, like "Prussianism and socialism", where he introduces the Prussian socialist utopia, in which technological progress plays a central role in the service of the new, manly man.

In the Theory of the Novel (1914) and in other works of Georg Lukacs, we identify the same tendency to transcend the pessimist tradition. Tragedy is presented by him as a component of lofty life in a community where a living link attaches the fate of the individual and human vocation. Lukacs understood that it is impossible to re-construct and utilize this forgotten reality of ideals that found its peak in its very beginning, in classical Greece. The freedom of the Greek subject, if he was allowed to be considered as a subject, was an anti-individual freedom. By contrast, we claim, and we think Lukacs included this intuition (implicitly) in his early works, in modern society freedom is always an alienated freedom which is allowed to dwell just in the private realm of the individual, who is deprived of his subjectivity. Modern society, Lukacs conceived, forces on the individual a confrontation with a cosmic realm of "objective facts" that is totally bare of any private and individual meaning.(52) According to Lukacs's conception, the writer of the novel is a creator, like the hero in Spengler's philosophy of history. This creator is not conceived by Lukacs as a product of the realm of "facts" and developments in society, but rather as an ontic stand of an authentic ego who can give "form" to life surrounding him. In his creative richness, the authentic writer is revealed by Lukacs as the one who installs order in a chaotic realm of formless "facts". The utopia here is an individualistic utopia: according to it an authentic artist is a real man; he can transcend from the existing order and shape an aesthetic order that, although it will not constitute a revolution and open new social possibilities for man, will enable the artist to protect his subjectivity, manifest his freedom, and orchestrate it in an artistic way. The artistic work of an authentic artist is "the grand work of art" that can resist reality and overcome it.

The pessimistic dimension here is that the artist's possibility of an authentic work of art is represented as a creation of meaning in a meaningless world. Ironically, the artist creates meaning in fiction, and only in fiction can meaning be preserved, while he manifests in his writing the senselessness of life in the modern world. This is the only justification Lukacs can provide for life and its sufferings.

In this individualistic utopia the artist is presented as an old Greek hero: he cannot be and he is not expected to be “successful" in life. By contrast, he is expected to transcend, for a moment, from the bourgeois everyday life where "everything is the same". The redemption he can expect is nothing but a moment of ataraxia, a tragic flash in which art hints at the dreadful alienation immanent in the bourgeois life. This tension governs many other pessimist thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. In the Frankfurt School, we can reconstruct two types of the pessimist-utopia relations. The one is represented by Herbert Marcuse, the other by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In the first, we will emphasize the pessimist dimension of an positive utopia. In the second, we will reveal the attempt to save utopia from an autonomous subject and real philosophical work through a critical return to metaphysical pessimism. Here we will meet pessimisutopianism, namely the fifth stage in the history of pessimism.
 

Marcuse's utopianism was already composed on the barricades of resurrected Berlin at the end of the First World War. The young Marcuse was strongly influenced by the young Lukacs, and traces of it are very noticeable already in Marcuse's dissertation. (1922). In the maximalistic aspect of his utopia, we can reconstruct the vision of "erotic reconciliation (union) of man and nature in the aesthetic attitude, where order is beauty and work is play".(53) Marcuse orchestrated a utopia of life as play in a liberated world: "The play impulse is the vehicle of this liberation. The impulse does not aim at playing `with` something; rather it is the play of life itself, beyond want and external compulsion".(54) The conception of life as play included the idea of overcoming work and the conclusion of the history of life as struggle.(55) In the pessimism of Nietzsche too we identified the conception of life as artistic play, as a never-ending play in human possibilities, but in Nietzsche's thought, and as we shall see later in the pessimism of Heidegger, there is no positive utopia of life as the happy and free play of man with his possibilities and within his potentials. In Heidegger's pessimism, life will be revealed as the free play of being that uses man, his fears, hopes, and potentials, to manifest beings and the human struggle for authenticity.

Marcuse, in contrast, while finding support in the young Marx's work and Freud's project, constituted a positive utopia that included nothing less than overcoming the eternal clash between the Freudian "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle", which was supposed to create a new reality principle that would include the merger of sensuality and reason in a completely new order of reality. This liberation was supposed to include conquering death by realizing a cyclical concept of time in the new reality.(56) But beside and against these positive and maximalistic utopian visions, we find in Marcuse's thought the central element of pessimism.

The first element of the pessimist dimension of Marcuse's thought is the category of progress. Marcuse, to the last days of his life, was dedicated to the linear perception of time and believed that there is real social progress in history. From the 1960s he believed in the supremacy of evil progress. However, here we have to be very specific: Marcuse has two concepts of progress, a "real" one and an evil one,(57) and the reconstruction of evil progress did not demolish his other linear time perception, the utopian one. He did not cancel the principal possibility of real historical progress, and he even retained optimism as a possibility for the future. But as for present society, his reconstruction shows that progress, in the sense that the Enlightenment gave it, is impossible in our world. The present "progress" is nothing but the triumph of "the logic of repression".(58) In his unpublished texts, Marcuse even sometimes comes to the conclusion that evil progress has the upper hand and that there is no way to retreat from the present (in)human situation.(59) In another unpublished text he concludes that "Western industrial society has no future".(60)

The most interesting of the texts that represent the pessimist dimension in Marcuse's thought is another unpublished text, "Marx, Freud and Monotheism". Here one can see to what extent orthodox Marxism is replaced by a pessimist conception of history. The telos of reason's progress and the emancipation of humanity is replaced by the concept of "Man's fatalistic disintegration to a unity of production and destruction, that reveals itself in technological progress".(61) According to Marcuse, this historical trend has shaped present nature and the possibilities of reason: "this fatalism has constituted itself in the social rationality... in this dress rationality itself has become an instrument of repression".(62) Marcusian pessimism manifests itself here by refusing the traditional Enlightenment's optimism for the social future of rationality. According to this tradition, justice and freedom are identified with the possibilities opened by realizing rationality (technological rationality included). This Marcusian text, like some of his other unpublished texts, grounds his pessimism in the exposure of the real nature of rationality today: according to the unofficial Marcuse, one should re-evaluate the idea of reason on which Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud relied so heavily, on the optimism that was supposed to be a by-product of its progress. Even Freud had faith in reason, in its association with science - a suitable substitute for religious fantasies. This "reason", according to the unofficial Marcuse, "has itself become an illusion, much the same as the illusions it was supposed to overcome".(63) Marcuse concludes that today "cultural progress becomes less and less rational", or that the unreasonable reality makes itself reasonable and the revolt to unreasonable. This position of his is opposed to the Marxian and the entire humanist tradition, according to which humanity marches forward to its maturity, when it will not have to use or be exposed to religions and superstitions.

Max Horkheimer began his intellectual odyssey by presenting an anti-utopian position, while being a Marxian utopist in the orthodox sense. In the 1930s he constructed the Critical Theory of society, in which the aim of the critique of ideologies is to arm the proletariat with an appropriate theoretical weapon. In the 1940s, the positive utopia of Horkheimer dissolved and was replaced with a totally new type of utopia, a negative utopia of which pessimism was its departure point.

In the introduction to The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the conjoint project of Adorno and Horkheimer, the two wrote that their aim was to "discover why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism".(64) We see in it an example of the tension between pessimism and Utopia in their thought. The new barbarism, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is not the Nazi one, but technological society in general. Here, as in other unexpected philosophical conceptions, we see much in common between the pessimism of Horkheimer/Adorno and the Heideggerian pessimism. Adorno and Horkheimer understood that every culture is immanently repressive, yet at the same time they refused to abandon their utopian claim for "real human conditions". The pessimist problematic is central to the critical project: the constitution of the individual self is based on suffering the manifest of the evil principium individuationis. Here is revealed the immanent temptation to self-annihilation that is manifested in illusions, such as utopian illusions, concerning "happiness" that are nothing but fleeting attempts.(65)

By deconstructing the Odysseus myth, Adorno and Horkheimer reconstructed the foundation of the emancipatory project. The enchanting siren's song that beckons mariners sailing nearby to fragmentation in the deep waters represents the basic tension between Eros and Thanatos, between nature and culture, between being and beings. Odysseus is faithful to his mission, to culture, and in order to save his crew, and his mission, he stops the ears of his men to prevent them from being tested, to see what call they obey - the call by nature since he knew they would not resist the power of beauty, real beauty, that of harmonious nature presented to them by the sirens. This beauty, unlike that promised by the cultural project, does not involve suffering and the trouble of being constituted amidst the individuality/alienation dialectic. But Odysseus himself, like each of us, is attracted to the truth of being in its purity. So Odysseus orders his men to tie him to the mast. In this way he adheres to his mission while facing beauty out of this world and at the same time manipulating the sirens and himself by cleaving to the mast and the principle of reality.

The conquering, the repression of the striving, promises "practical" results, "succes". Yet compliance to the striving brings nothing but sweet annihilation, "disaster" from the repression principle’s point of view. Repression has been successfully internalized. By this deconstruction, Adorno and Horkheimer tried to show the origins of instrumental reason that is governed by the repression principle. "The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice. In other words: the history of renunciation. Everyone who practices renunciation gives away more of his life than is given back to him and more than the life he vindicates".(66) Their pessimism is revealed here by their tracing the foundation of instrumental reason and technological progress as evil. Here they also manifest their evaluation of the principium individuationis as pre-condition and bearer of evil.

According to Horkheimer, man's ontological position forces him to choose between being enslaved by nature or subordinating nature - and paying the price for it.(67) Humanity's liberation from nature and magic is revealed as an element in his pessimism. Magic's importance is denoted by him, as symbols in magic were not mere signs but were conceived as tied to being. He denotes the vanity of convergence from magic to Enlightenment: overcoming the world, externalization of the self to nature.(68) He develops Schopenhauer's position according to which man is constituted as self-consciousness by his intellect, while understanding intellect as demolishing the connection between nature and man, who strives to take advantage of it, and pays the price not only for departing from nature but for departing from his "essence".(69) Man is caught in a vicious circle: the very constitution of the individual, the self, is a substance to dissolve the harmonic nature, which the individual struggles to establish through knowledge and sacrifices himself for this cause. Man's exploitation of nature becomes the abuse of nature in man. This is, as it were, the retaliation of nature for the atrocities of the progress of techne and its transformation into technology. This is, according to Horkheimer, the basis of the liberation ideals that manifest the utopian quest(70) and of instrumental reason. At its peak, technological efficiency dissolves spirit.(71) Horkheimer even speaks on the desolation of language and its retreat into its magic origin.(72)

His critique reveals the degeneration of all dimensions of reason into one: power. Totally conquered by power, the individual is deprived of his subjectivity and is driven to function as a producer-consumer. He becomes part and parcel of the standardization tendency in which mass media, that have no "target" or "orientation", play a leading part.(73) On this point, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin anticipate many of the more interesting arguments of Postmodernism. The price of life is its transformation into repression.(74)

The philosophical struggle turns into an existential battle for a dialogue, which is a political praxis concerning way of life and the very possibility of authentic choosing among different possible ways of life. In the new social condition, there is no open way to such a decision, according to Horkheimer. In such a situation, philosophy becomes a struggle over "the totally different". Horkheimer, like Adorno, was obliged to continue on the quest for the "totally other". Following De Sade, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, he devoted himself to the struggle for "the totally different" through negative utopia, a new destination that he introduced into philosophy in our era. According to Horkheimer, the acceptance of philosophy's call that is still possible in our era must traverse the basic problematic of Schopenhauer and philosophical pessimism. Today, in the God-absent system, morality is relevant only within the framework of philosophical pessimism, especially in light of disbelief in omnipotent, eternal and rightful essence on the one hand, and with no total surrender to the "facts" on the other.(75)

Horkheimer understood that the only critical dimension in which the individual can challenge the impossibility of self-assertion is about to become part of one-dimensional instrumental reason, to turn into a child's toy.(76) Today, with the hindsight of thirty years, we can say that this apocalyptic situation is already our everyday reality. But since its beginnings philosophy has been on the edge of extinction, and all along philosophers have been immature, arrogant children who refused to grow up, insisting on transcendence into truth while declaring reality as unreal, and denouncing success and the authority of the "facts". Horkheimer, in studying the metaphysical and social reasons for the demolition of reason and the melting of the cultural relevance of philosophy, is not fearful of this reality; he is, on the contrary, anxious to challenge this it, while acknowledging its impotence. The narrowing of self-constituting possibilities, un-functional critique’s becoming irrational in the new reality, the end of academic preservation of Western culture - all these re-emphasize the importance of philosophical discourse, especially its pessimist tradition. But this does not mean necessarily that philosophy today is still possible, in light of the triumph of the individual and the disappearance of the subject as a cultural and social agent.

Horkheimer and Adorno understood that a person who is unwilling and unable to evaluate and judge the present reality is incapable of self-reflection and is enslaved by mythical powers of the system in which he dwells, like the situation in which prehistoric man was enslaved to myths that constituted his consciousness. In the absence of a true autonomous subject, or even one who struggles for his autonomy as a (social and solidarian) subject, there is no place for a dialogue. The struggle over the philosophical possibilities of a dialogue is nothing but a cultural and social battle about a concrete way of life, a political struggle. Horkheimer gives Socrates and Jesus as examples of such a struggle.(77) So, what is the historical difference? The difference is not grounded in the necessity of the struggle, but in the impossibility of such a struggle in our era. So, who is the ideal partner for such a dialogue if Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism is grounded? An "imaginary witness" is their only true partner for philosophizing: "If there is anyone today to whom we can pass the responsibility for the message, we bequeath it not to the ‘masses’, and not to the individual (who is powerless), but to an imaginary witness - lest it perish with us".(78)

Our historical situation is, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, no historical "mistake". This is an immanent realization of the maxim that the price of life is the transformation into repression. Nevertheless, they refused to yield, but insisted on their utopia. The only acceptable aim left for philosophy is "to translate....". This mission of philosophy can be understood as an extreme minimization, but also as the only true rational end still possible for the subject. In other words, philosophy becomes not a tool or therapeutic practice, but a realm, the only realm where the struggle for preserving subjectivity is still open.

But according to Adorno and Horkheimer, and to Plato, this utopian mission of philosophy can be realized just as a social praxis, as a concrete way of life. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, there are no social and cultural conditions for the subject and for an open, free, and public rational dialogue, as Habermas still believes. Their pessimism reflects this historic situation as a manifestation of human ontology. And yet, their negation is not total and formal, but dialectical: their pessimism transforms and distributes the philosophical Eros and the condition for hope that is incubated in the preservation of Western culture while criticizing it and negating the present "facts". They try to negate the present totality and yet avoid a foundationalist stand on the one hand, and relativism on the other.

Pessimism allows them this project by introducing late Critical Theory as negative theology. This pessimistic utopianism of Adorno and Horkheimer is the opposite of Marcuse's utopian pessimism, first of all by (implicitly) recognizing the omnipotence of what we call the realm of self-evidence which education distributes as common understanding in each speech community. They too, like Marcuse, are obliged to negate the present "facts", but without Marcuse's foundationalism. Marcuse thought that he could trace an objective parameter for human "authentic needs" by the power of his art critique, using Marx and Freud for the sake of basing on real substance his negative Eros and critical power. Therefore, he had a positive utopian alternative, in which art is realized and becomes "a form of life", while Adorno and Horkheimer were faithful to their anti-foundationalist critique and negative utopia.

They understood that justice can manifest itself only negatively, by evil, and that Utopia can never realize itself without paying the price of transforming itself to its opposite. Their negation of the "facts" of the present reality was kept alive by "the hope principle", by their religiosity that negated any form of religion, Marxism included. They acknowledged their baseless quest, rejected relativism and subjectivism while refusing any positive alternative; in other words, they were consistent philosophical pessimists. They could not touch spirit, but they could struggle for the formulation of their negation of the ideological system, which is governed by the present Western realm of self-evidence that manipulated their generation. A similar negative theology was shared by another member of the Frankfurt school, Walter Benjamin, who understood that in secular history there is no place for the messianic. The just and therefore positive utopia can manifest the victory of sheer power.

In Benjamin's text concerning "the theses on history", the negation of the present system reveals the omnipotence of the symbolic aggression of the present realm of self-evidence. However, his utopia is negative: no leap is possible from present reality and its "facts" but an interpretive one. In contrast to Marcuse's basic optimism, in Benjamin's project the philosopher does not rely on the revolutionary praxis of the exploited class or classless minorities, but on saving the (lost) memories of the defeated by jumping into the past. With religious devotion he conducts his struggle for the redemption of the defeated from both oblivion and the manipulation by the current order and its agents. Redemption(79) turns out to be the interpreter's aesthetic institution of the "now-time". He fights for the salvation of his soul against the pressure of being absorbed into vagueness and into the void of what we call the realm of self-evidence, which results from the deterministic surrender to the interpretive consensus of the system.

Negative utopia does not mean giving up utopia: "the messianic time"(80) bursts into the "now-time"(81) which penetrates, even if only for a moment, the continuity of the vain progress of catastrophic time, and creates a special point - extra-temporal - in which time ceases to flow and a redeemed space of time is constituted, and through which the attempt is made possible to call things by their true name and to fight the "evil" celebrating its victory.

Benjamin's pessimism discloses the presence of violence within the continuity of "the whole time everything being the same" as a cosmic fate, a fate grounded in mystic necessity. Reality is revealed as essentially tragic, not as a certain historical stage nor as an accident, but as normality itself. "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not an exception, but the rule".(82) His pessimism manifests itself in "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "There is a picture by Klee, which is called Angelus Novus. An angel is represented in it, who looks as if he was about to move away from something at which he is staring. His eyes are widely open, his mouth is open and his wings are relaxed. Thus the angel of history should appear. He has turned his eyes towards the past. Where to us a chain of events seems to appear, he sees a single catastrophe, piling up continuously ruins upon ruins, and casting them in front of his feet. He might want to remain, to awaken the dead and to re-assemble what was shattered. But a storm moves in from paradise, which has entangled itself into his wings, and which is so strong that the angel cannot close them anymore. Unrestrained, this storm pushes him into the future to which he turns his back, while the piles of ruins in front of him grow up to the heaven. What we call progress is this storm".(83)

We have to evaluate the philosophical pessimism of Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer by problematizing their negative utopianism in face of their realm of understanding. In Benjamin's terms, this interpretive critique as the only unrepressive (anti-positive utopianism) praxis takes place within the limits of history, of "now-time". In our terms, this practice is immanently ruled by the realm of self-evidence in which the interpreters are jailed, even as refusers and rebels. And how can they know when "the totally different", or "messianic time" enters, as in Plato's cave, "suddenly" and enlightens them and when they are re-distributing one of the realms of self-evidence's manipulations? What is their foundation to evaluate contrasting concepts, histories, and memories ?

Horkheimer and Adorno do have an answer, according to which Western tradition and its unfulfilled ideals are the ground from which they can raise their hopes and rational criteria. But they themselves came to the conclusion that in light of technological progress and the triumph of instrumental rationality over objective reason, rationality has become irrational, and their critique is therefore irrational from the point of view of present reality. Furthermore, how can they ground their devotion to Western tradition and explicate the principle supremacy of it over other cultural traditions that Western culture oppressed? Spirit could have laughed, like God addressing Job's concluding speech when retreating into total subversiveness to God's meaningless play with Satan in Job's fate and his life's mission.

But spirit does not have a face, nor purpose or meaning. These are products of its realms of understanding whose productivity is controlled by different systems, which Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer so wisely deconstructed, before those who today are called the postmodern thinkers. Postmodernism is here represented as the last stage in the history of pessimism.
 

Postmodernism is a manifestation of a reality in which a place for a new consciousness is constituted. It concerns human beings as living today in a present with no foundation for its epistemology and its present and future manipulation apparatus. At the same time, and for the same reason, it refuses to concern itself with being itself and its possible metaphysical ways of contemplation. In the Western past, we might have called this philosophy pessimist, but postmodern thinkers will probably refuse to be included in this category or to be regarded as part of the history of pessimism, mainly because they would not like to see themselves as part of any "tradition", especially not a modern one.

Postmodernism, as Nietzsche already did, would not like to see itself as the head of "good" and "evil". However, at the same, it turns back to the dichotomies of "nice" and "ugly", while preferring in art not just the ugly and the spoiled, but also the "evil" that rules as the sole prince of reality.(84) Postmodern decadence does not see the present "lost of passion and meaning" as a dramatic event( 85) not even "the end of man".

In The Order of Things (1971) Foucault represents the end of modern man, from Kant to Marx and Marcuse - and the end of the Nietzschean man as well. But while Foucault's pessimism serious, Derrida'spessimism is ironical-serious.

Derrida presents a similar position to Foucault's, if we are allowed by him to continue utilizing categories as a theoretical "position". In contrast to the pessimist tradition's characteristics we have found so far, Derrida's negation cannot treat as serious even itself, and cannot afford to present itself as having a superior status than its negated position. When we found similar views in the philosophy of Leopardi, Mainlaender and Bahnsen, it was from a serious, dramatic, and even tragic orientation, in contrast to the postmodern attitude as presented by Derrida's philosophy. His deconstruction is not targeted at traditional utopian horizons, like repressive revolutionary theory or practice, but at the very ideal of an autonomous subject who is able to use a "correct" or "preferable" critique. This kind of pessimism is free of any erotic belief in man, truth, the mission of criticism, or solidarity. Still, he has a utopia of his own; explicitly it is a negative, subjective utopia, very different from other (universal) negative utopias we have evaluated, but it is not so. His utopia is not negative; it is pessimist.

From the depths of the lack of a Cartesian center, such as "ego", his pessimism turns towards a new stage in the history of pessimism, the stage of open and empty horizons, of the will to total pleasure of de-construction - without being devoted/obliged/enslaved to any target, mission or meaning(86) and freed from the quest to a center or a transcendental dimension that exists, as it were, beyond the horizon.

What Foucault calls "the end of man" is realized by Roland Barth's conception of the subject as a locus of passions and impulses, strivings and symbols. For Barth there is no place for human autonomy, not even as an ideal, since texts constitute the subjects that aim at an interpretation, while de-constructing texts exist, since we live in a Heraclitian world, where "everything flaws".(87) For Lakan the subject retains a certain meaning, just as a language structure, and "it is always something that is eroding, that is created by 'its' signifiers". Here, it is no longer "Man" or "humanity" that constitutes signifiers that signify the world in an act of mimesis, but the opposite. We face the annihilation of the "subject", what Eastern culture called for the last two centuries "humanity", "class", or "Man". For Barth is "this something", that for a brief historical moment was conceived as an "autonomic subject"', if not in practice, at least as an ideal. So where does the subject dwell today? From the postmodernist’s point of view this is an invalid question, since there is no longer one total, universal "present", nor is there an uncontingent, meaningless "narrative" or identity. This view deconstructs even the subject as having one or a certain "identity".

For Lakan "the subject", as an autonomous subject, exists only in its repressive formation and is the conclusion of first order repression, the conscious-linguistic repression. The signifier rules as the only cause and source of "meaning". That which we bear in us and becomes accepted in postmodernism as the absent center, the source of personal experience, is revealed here as something foreign to us which constitutes the ego, its strivings, quests, fears, and conceptualizations. Lakan and the postmodernists who follow him, are at this point are very close to our conception about the triad of meanings and passions that produce the "I", which will manifest them even while negating them. Heraclitus manifests this relevancy.

The Heraclitic anti-philosophy formulated the "total flax" on the supremacy of the logos. There are no borders for the logos, no beginning, no end, and it looks as if it also creates Heraclitus's own rhetoric.

The Heraclitian logos departs from the universality of individual things. However, as wisdom manifests itself as a subjective human quality, it is deciphered as logos that manipulates the wise man by its very presence in him, like the Platonic Eros. Heraclitus says in the first fragment: "But of this account, which holds forever, people forever prove uncomprehending, both before and after they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For, although all things happen in accordance with this account, they are like people without experience when they experience words and deeds such as I set forth, distinguishing (as I do) each thing according to its real constitution, i.e., pointing out how it is. The rest of mankind, however, fail to be aware of what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do while asleep."(88) Nietzsche is quick to represent this conception in its other aspect, identifying it as "an identification between the ego and the truth".(89)

The "total flax" in Heraclitus's and Nietzsche’s utopia demands the act of deciphering the self-creation, life as living art as the only possible way of challenging living death (meaningless life), if nothing more than re-manifesting the omnipotence of meaningless logos. In their pessimism, this project presents their Dionysian anti-philosophy. This challenge presents itself as logos's dimension in a world order and a rhetoric that gives birth to the philosopher as a tragic erotic who is in love with his destiny. But, if Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer claimed the individual's lost subjectivity, Barth, Derrida, Lakan and de Man openly declare their affirmation of de-construction not only of heroism, but also of the erotic striving, and the revolutionary and the tragic heroism as well.

One can claim that pessimists like Mainlaender have already given up the (individual-subjective) utopia, when they demand self-murder as the extraction of the central conclusion of Western metaphysics. However, in the postmodern discourse there is no room for tragic annihilation, and it does not strive consciously to self- murder, but to the indispensable destruction of the will to know (the "truth") and the erotic striving for meaning, yardsticks for judgment between conflicting claims and passions and the ability to constitute a connection to a point of reference as a way to the transcendence from the world of beings to being.

The ironic postmodern identification with the present as unreal and its deconstruction from the quest for the absolute and the subjective are nothing but a new form of self-murder, which sets the new stage for the development of Western culture and its triumphant instrumental reason. At the same time, the new system whose constitution postmodernism symbolizes is potentially a gate to a new realm of self-evidence. Meanwhile, postmodernism represents itself, its missing "self", the absent totality that will collide with the present dying Western systems.

Postmodernism can represent itself just as a game, which as liberating from repressive modernist conceptions as it is, cannot justify itself as having a preferable stand in relation to everything it deconstructs. This game is possible only after the price is paid (or the victory is gained) of giving up "total refusal" to the present reality. It is not just a negation of the imperative that demands the autonomous subject's self-constitution. It is also a positive political praxis: seduction to merge in the local pragmatic horizons, with no love and no utopian obligation for justice or meaning.

The postmodernist's pride is in his easygoing pessimism, in being tentative, with no theory or philosophy, in having nothing meaningful to say. Yet here there is here a utopian dimension, against his will: like the Herculean philosopher, he is not afraid of the unknown places whither his total deconstructive myths are carrying him. Not only is this freedom that is based on the absolute nothingness not enlightened by a telos, a yardstick, it is even without passion, like the Nietzschean Zarathustra had. This free wandering is regarded even in postmodern rhetoric itself as a construct of "power", metaphorical power, by which in the endpostmodernism, like what it deconstructs, is constituted and in whose service it works. Not the social reality alone, but even its critical evaluation and deconstruction are understood as part of the "system's" self-regulation and its critics. Eros is nothing but a fruitful part of its self-regulation and re-production.(90)

Baudrillard gives up purpose, any purpose, including lofty purposes. In the current stage of the pessimist tradition, we are left only with de-constructions as reflexive responses of those who are composed by present myths to feel they are ironical rebels in the Western heritage. In our world "there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to any thing whatsoever, by virtue of pure contingency... there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value".(91)

The de-construction of pessimism and utopianism in Western metaphysical tradition becomes re-production of a non-dogmatic pessimism and negative utopia, as an old-new building of a linguistic Tower of whose head finally transcends the hegemonic realm of self-evidence, after being frustrated by God in the previous attempt. But this time heaven does not carry any God, any punishment in the form of the destruction of heavenly language or the egoistic and nationalistic kind. In all its strength just one punishment remains: the very building of the renewed Tower of Babel in the center of "Babylon". The de-constructivist utopia and praxis are the present revelation of the primordial sin that is the impetus of spirits' creativity when constructing common understanding realms that produce the cultural and social possibilities for the creation of ideologies that govern and create men and women.
 

1. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Frankfurt a.M, 1959

On the fertility of utopia in Bloch's project see:

Ernst Bloch, "Schopenhauers Pessimismus und die Potentialitaeten der Kategorie 'Moeglichkeit'", in Hans Ebeling und luedger Lukehaus, (Hg.), Schopenhauer und Marx, Hain 1980, p. 129-131

For Bloch's view on the pessimism issue see:

Ernst Bloch, "Das Unrecht des Pessimismus", in Ernst Bloch, Politische Messungen, Gesamtausgabe, Band XI, Frankfurt a.M, 1977, p. 222-225

2. In Latin: pessimus - the most evil; in French: pessimisme; in Italian: pessimismo; in Hebrew: hara.

3. See: James Sully, Pessimism, 1877

Olga Pluemacher, Pessimismus in vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Muenchen 1884

Eduard von Hartmann, Zur Geschichte und Begrundung des Pessimismus, Leipzig 1892

4. L. Loemeker, "Pessimism", in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York 1967, p. 114

It is worth mentioning that in the German philosophical encyclopedia pessimism is introduced as a philosophical concept. See V. Gerhardt, "Pessimismus", Historisches Woerterbuch der Philosophie, J. Ritter und K. Gruender (Hg.), Band VII, 1990, p. 385

5. Ludwig Marcuse, Meine Geschichte der Philosophie, Zuerich 1953, pp. 37-38

6. Beata Szymanska, "Dispute over Pessimism", Reports on Philosophy, IV, 1980, p. 24

7. V. Gerhardt, "Pessimismus", p. 383

8. Paul Siwek, "Pessimism in Philosophy", The New Scholasticism, Vol. XXXII, (July 1948), p. 252

9. Paul Siwek, ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Friedrich Grinsfeld, Neviim Bibeli Kavod, Tel Aviv 1988, p. 11 (In Hebrew).

12. A. Betz, Aesthetik und Politik Heines Prose, Muenchen 1971, p. 36

13. Olga Petraschek, Die Rechtphilosophie des Pessimismus, Muenchen 1929, p. 34

14. A. Sicinski, "Optimism versus pessimism", The Polish Sociological Bulletin, Vol. 1-2, (1972), pp. 50-51

15. Heinrich Heine, The Complete Poems of Henrich Heine, translated by Hal Draper, Oxford 1982, p. 484

16. Arthur Schopenhauer, Saemtliche Werke, IV, Lepzig 1922, p. 51

17. Ibid.

18. Olga Pluemacher, op. cit., pp. 131-132

19. Karl Marx, Early Texts, translated by David McLellan, Oxford 1971, p. 150

20. Ibid.

21. Herbert Schnaedelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933, translated by Eric Matthew, Cambridge 1984, pp. 33-64

22. Eduard von Hartmann, Zur Geschichte und Begrundung des Pessimismus, Leipzig 1882, p. 239

23. Philipp Mainlaender, Philosophie der Erloesung, Berlin 1879, p. 10

24. Ibid. p. 326

25. Here we cannot introduce Kierkegaard. He did not see himself as a pessimist, but we think one should include him in the history of pessimism.

26. Mainlaender, ibid., p. 575

26a. Johann Joachim Gestering, German Pessimism and Indian Philosophy, New Delhi 1986, p. 85

27. Olga Pluemacher, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Heidelberg 1884, p. 249

28. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York 1931, p. 62

29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann, London 1968, p. 56

30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Francis Golffing, New York 1956, p. 101

31. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York 1931, p. 308

32. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, The Complete Works of Friedreich Nietzsche, X, translated by Thomas Common, New York 1964, p. 332

33. On Nietzsche's critique of Bhansen, Mainlaender, and von Hartmann see ibid., pp. 320-321

34. Friedrich Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 335

35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 521

36. Friedrich Nietzsche, ibid., p. 73

37. Friedrich Nietzsche, ibid., p. 224

38. Friedrich Nietzsche, ibid., p. 73

39. Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals", in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York 1931, p. 54

40. Ibid.

41. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 450

42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, p. 335

43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 450

44. Friedrich Nietzsche, ibid., p. 452

45. Friedrich Nietzsche, ibid.,

46. Ferdinand Toenis, Fundamental Concepts of Sociology, translated by C. Loomis, New York 1940, p. 38

47. K. O. Petraschek, ibid., p. 39

48. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. I, translated by F. Atkinson, New York 1961, p. 31

49. Oswald Spengler, Pessimismus ?, Berlin 1922, p. 15

Like Spengler and Toennis, Simmel too is yet on a direct confrontation with the pessimist tradition. See:

Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, Leipzig 1920

Georg Simmel, "Ueber die Grundfragen des Pessimismus", Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik, 90, (1887)

50. Oswald Spengler, Pessimismus ?, p. 18

51. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, p. 61

52. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, Cambridge 1971, p. 95

53. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization - A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston 1955, p. 176

54. Herbert Marcuse, ibid., p, 187

55. Herbert Marcuse, "Liberation from the Affluent Society", in David Cooper, (ed.) Dialectic of Liberation, London 1979, p. 184

56. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures, translated by J. Shapiro, Boston 1970, p. 41

57. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Boston 1971, pp. 30-31

58. Herbert Marcuse, ibid., p. 20

59. Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse Archiv 564.02

60. Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse Archiv 569.00

61. Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse Archiv 241.10

62. Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse Archiv 241.01

63. Herbert Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse Archiv 241.12

64. Max Horkheimer-Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming, New York 1969, p. XI

65. Max Horkheimer-Theodor Adorno, ibid., p. 33

66. Max Horkheimer-Theodor Adorno, ibid., p. 55

67. Max Horkheimer-Theodor Adorno, ibid., pp. 54, 59

68. Max Horkheimer,-Theodor Adorno, ibid., pp. 17-18

69. Max Horkheimer, "Die Aktualitaet Schopenhauers", Gesammelte Schriften, VII, Frankfurt a.M 1985, s. 131

70. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, New York 1974, p. 182

71. Max Horkheimer, ibid., pp. 23-24

72. Max Horkheimer, ibid., p. 22

73. Max Horkheimer-Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 164, 166, 222

74. Max Horkheimer-Theodor Adorno, ibid., p. 215

75. Max Horkheimer, "Schopenhauers Denken in Verhaeltnis zu Religion und Wissenschaft", Gesammelte Schriften, VII, Frankfurt a.M 1985, s. 251

76. Max Horkheimer, "Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen", Gesammelte Schriften VII, Frankfurt a.M 1985, s. 404

77. MaxHorkheimer, "Dialog ueber Dialog", p. 305

78. Max Horkheimer-Theodor Adorno, ibid., p. 256

79. Walter Benjamin, "Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte", Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2, Frankfurt a.M, s. 695-697

80. Walter Benjamin, ibid., s. 703

81. Walter Benjamin, ibid., s. 701

82. Walter Benjamin, "Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte, s. 697

83. Walter Benjamin, ibid., s. 697-698

84. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, translated by James Benedict, London-New York 1993, p. 81

85. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, London 1986

86. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Atridge, New York 1992, p. 277-278

87. Roland Barth, Text, Discourse, Ideology, New York 1981, p. 44

88. Heraclitus, Fragments, translated by T.M . Robinson, Toronto 1987, p. 11

89. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke, IV. Leipzig 1921, p. 393

90. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman - Reflections on Time, translated by Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford 1991, p. 13

91. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, translated by James Benedict, London 1993, p. 5