Disenchanted Wanderer by Glenn Cronin

Author:Glenn Cronin [Cronin, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Biography & Autobiography, Philosophers, Religion, Christianity, Orthodox
ISBN: 9781501760198
Google: KpESEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-11-15T02:46:02+00:00

We have noted Leontiev’s method of “flitting” through the works of philosophers and social theorists to find supporting evidence for his ideas. He now lights upon Schopenhauer’s critique of optimistic ideology, that the idea of progress is a dream bound in the long run to be brought to ruin by the essential insatiability of the needs of the will and the paradox that each need satisfied and each goal achieved only gives rise, hydra-like, to new needs and new goals to torment humanity. This view of the nature of existence provides Leontiev with a theoretical underpinning for the thesis that pessimism is the only possible attitude for anyone who has penetrated to the real nature of things. Seen through this prism, the end result of all progress must be mankind coming to an awareness of the true poverty of its achievements and returning to religion for consolation. “In soil thoroughly prepared by the teachings of pessimism,” Leontiev suggests, “all positive religions could freely flourish and gather a splendid harvest, for who would wish to live long by dismal negation alone, negation of all bounty, both in this world and (as Hartmann supposes) in the next?”56

Of particular interest to Leontiev is Schopenhauer’s discovery that the root of unhappiness lies in man’s nature, not in the conditions in which we exist: “Universal happiness will not come about, for suffering is in us, and not in external circumstances. Boredom will grow in proportion to the increase in material comforts … A Christian may usefully exploit this intelligent aspect of pessimism for the strengthening of his outlook on life.”57 Indeed Leontiev had by now come to regard the German philosophic tradition from Leibniz and Kant to Schopenhauer and Hartmann as “broadening and deepening the mystico-religious principles of the future.”58 The support he finds in this tradition for his conviction that the power of evil in human affairs is enduring and ineradicable becomes for him one more weapon in what was effectively his life’s crusade: to affirm, in the teeth of nineteenth-century progressive optimism, the totality of human life and human history in all their aspects: “Truth is not to be found in rights and freedom, but in something else entirely, something which will bring no cheer to those who seek peace and reason in earthly affairs, but which is entirely bearable and even pleasing if you view life as a swiftly passing dream. Pessimism regarding the whole of mankind and personal faith in divine providence and in our fragility and ignorance, that is what reconciles a man with his own life, with the power of others, with the awful and eternally tragic face of history.”59

Thus Leontiev, the self-styled “cosmic pessimist,” reconciles belief in this “worst of all possible worlds” with faith in divine providence.60 This method, which he styled “optimistic pessimism,” is a key element in his later politics as well as his religious outlook. He starts from the premise that the terms optimism and pessimism, as usually understood, are too nebulous: “It seems

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