This book was written as both a complement and a critique to the last book I reviewed (“Pessimism,” by Dienstag).
Van Der Lugt’s critique is that Dienstag simplified the pessimist tradition by conflating “pessimism” as a whole with what in fact is a “future-oriented” pessimism that has roots in the writings of Rousseau and Leopoldi and takes full bloom in the metaphysics of Schopenhauer (a metaphysics of suffering, in a sense).
She claims that the pessimistic tradition, however, goes back farther, and was originally focused on the problem of evil (how evil seemingly can’t be squared with the supposed omni-* attributes of God — omni-benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent), and specifically on arguments against the theodicies (the systematic attempts to refute the problem of evil) like those of Leibniz.
That older pessimistic tradition — which she refers to as value-oriented pessimism — really begins with Bayle, and with his 6 million word “Dictionnaire historique et critique” in 1696. mind_blown
Dark Matters is fascinating and detailed. It is both a work of history as well as a work of philosophy. It retraces the intricate steps of all the various thinkers on both sides of the theocidicy debates — i.e. the value-oriented optimists like Leibniz, King, La Mettrie, and Rousseau, versus the value-oriented pessimists like Bayle, Maupertius, Voltaire, and Hume. And it elucidates, critiques, and connects all their various thinking.
There’s a special chapter on Kant and his “destruction” of theodicy, and the penultimate chapter culminates in an examination of Schopenhauer, and the paradigm shift he exemplified in the tradition, from value-oriented to future-oriented pessimism.