Refuge as a Way of Life

Michael McGhee reviews “Pessimism, Quietism and Nature as Refuge” by David E. Cooper.

By Michael McGheeOctober 4, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

DAVID E. COOPER’S Pessimism, Quietism and Nature as Refuge is a personal, provocative, and important new book that makes the case for what we might want to dismiss as unfortunate human tendencies. We usually mock the misanthropist or the pessimist and, in doing so, keep them at a safe psychological distance, through satire or, more rarely, the tragedy of mental collapse. Our popular images float lazily on the surface of our cultural history. One thinks of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Molière’s The Misanthropist, and, in Voltaire’s Candide, the comic figure of Martin, whose pessimism is the foil to Professor Pangloss’s Leibnizian optimism. But how long do you have to live on the planet before you think that maybe they have a point, that humanity is in a deep mess of its own making and is going to stay that way? The mockery of a Voltaire holds the proverbial mirror up to nature—we enjoy the caricatures and miss the illusions and evasions of our own portrait.

Cooper holds up the same mirror and makes an alarmingly eloquent case for a misanthropic pessimism that will force reflection on the conditions for living well. He deals with dark topics, yet with a light touch, continuing a philosophical tradition that retains and underlines a negative moral judgment on humankind and its prospects but discards a merely sullen rejection of human society.

The author has already done vital and influential work in shifting the self-absorbed focus of Anglophone philosophy toward the formation of a “world philosophy,” and has drawn freely on South Asian and East Asian sources, bringing them into conversation with Western philosophy in a creative fusion that has refreshed and humanized the discipline.

Cooper’s latest book exemplifies that fusion, and it is wonderfully rich in literary and philosophical allusions from many traditions. He asks an ancient question: how should we live? The early Western philosophers did not ask this question in a serene spirit of detached inquiry, and neither does Cooper. He raises it against the background of our political, ecological, and cultural depredations, and in a spirit of “disquiet” as he reflects on humanity’s radical inhumanity: “The reader of the book is intended to ask, like its author, ‘How, if at all, should I adjust, shape and conduct my life in the light of this negative appraisal of the human condition?’”

Cooper uses the “relatively bland” term “disquiet” to cover a range of responses, including anguish and despair. This “negative appraisal” gives us the philosophical sense he attaches to “misanthropy.” He cites Jonathan Swift’s remark that misanthropy is not directed at individuals “whom one may ‘heartily love,’ but at ‘that animal called man.’” Cooper’s pessimism is related to misanthropy and is, again, not a gloomy character trait but the further moral judgment that amelioration is not a genuine possibility. He draws on the Buddhist tradition: “Not only did the Buddha express a deeply negative judgement on humankind, but he provided what perhaps remains the most detailed and penetrating account of [humanity’s] moral and spiritual failings.”

Cooper refers in particular to the first two of the Four Noble Truths, “the truth of suffering” and “the truth of the origin of suffering.” In his first chapter he gives an eloquent and vivid account of the latter, of tanha (or “thirst” or “greed”), its relation to the illusions of selfhood, and the way its tentacles spread into multiple aspects of our personal and social life. He brings pessimism and misanthropy together: “The sufferings, disappointments and anxieties identified by the pessimist serve to consolidate and exacerbate the failings exposed by the misanthrope. In turn, some of these failings make any radical melioration of our condition improbable.”

In subsequent chapters, Cooper discusses our profound evasiveness in “amnesia and nihilism,” contrasts “activism” and “quietism,” elaborates the idea of “nature as refuge” (a resonant Buddhist notion), and ends with a discussion of “quietism, truth and mystery.” Mystery, and our possible attunement to “the way of things,” is an important theme in his previous work, particularly The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery (2002) and Senses of Mystery: Engaging with Nature and the Meaning of Life (2017).

Cooper’s critique of the illusions of social activism and his argument in favor of quietism are likely to draw strong reactions, but reactivity is itself a feature of the behavior that leads to his pessimist verdict. And there are surely forms of activism that reveal a lack of self-awareness and an avoidance of inwardness. But their development might nevertheless reframe our conception of activism. It makes no sense for an activist to aim for the amelioration of the human condition, but it doesn’t follow that they shouldn’t aim vigorously for the amelioration of social conditions, for example—though it would have to be the right kind of vigor for the right kind of objective.

Readers familiar with the Buddhist traditions will want to know how Cooper treats the third and fourth of the Four Noble Truths: the truth of the end of suffering and that of the path that leads to the end of suffering. The Buddhist idea of “going for refuge” is first hinted at and then amplified in his chapters on refuge and on Nature as refuge. Cooper writes eloquently about the universality of witness to the need for retreat or withdrawal from “busyness, turbulence, hyperactivity, and thirst for achievement and accumulation that, as Zhuangzi put it, turn us into ‘galloping horses’ unable to stop and take stock, exhausting ourselves and incapable of proper rest.” What is crucial here is the idea of stopping and taking stock, conditions for “living in the truth,” a phrase Cooper takes from Kierkegaard, drawing analogues from different cultural traditions, including theism, pan(en)theism, and the Daoist way.

Cooper talks of Nature as “‘other’ in that our experience of it does not have to be—and should not be—dictated, in the way experience of the human world is, by functional, utilitarian purposes.” But by the same token, glimpses of “living in the truth” show us that experience of the human world does not have to be dictated “by functional, utilitarian purposes” either. We have at least minimal access to possibilities witnessed even in our own “disquiet,” which is already a moral notion, just as the so-called “mental poisons” of greed, hatred, and delusion derive from a perspective that sees them precisely as the poisons and “obscurations” that favor a transactional relationship to other human beings over benevolence or “humaneness,” a humane wu wei.

The point about Cooper’s misanthropy is that it is already a negative moral judgment which intensifies a moral disquiet that may lead to possibilities of humaneness revealed in the refuge of Nature or the quietness of a garden, but also through the touch of an act of kindness. Our condition is such that these moral judgments derive from an already present humaneness obscured and overlain by the virulence of tanha. On Cooper’s view, it seems that the truth of the path to the end of suffering is that under certain conditions of refuge, a way of life is revealed: a path that is to be pursued, paradoxically, not as a means toward the end of the suffering caused by tanha but as a means toward greater openness to this possibility of humaneness.

This does not undermine the judgments that constitute pessimism and misanthropy. They are realistic judgments that may undermine us, but which may, through recoil, open up a path of inwardness. It makes no sense to pursue an activist project that seeks to ameliorate the human condition or alleviate the suffering of humanity if we understand that condition or suffering as arising out of tanha. People can only do that in their own case, one at a time, though sometimes with encouragement from friends, perhaps forming schools of wisdom that will however inevitably tend towards corruption:

The quietist’s hope […] is not for a revolution that will bring an end to suffering and usher in an age of general happiness. But it is a hope that quietists might reasonably entertain for their own prospect of happiness, and for that of the people they may persuade, by word or example, of the wisdom of the quietist dispensation.

Cooper is an unwavering and subtle mentor who puts us in touch with ancient wisdom in a rich language that derives from many traditions, bringing them into conversation with each other. As the forces of injustice loom, we may have to question the limits of both quietism and activism, but that, too, is an ancient conversation, between the activist who is too quick and the quietist too slow to stand up and be counted.