Does time deceive us with the mask of space? Beauty and hope in youth according to a "philosophical pessimism"

Abstract

Our object is the relationship, expressed particularly in a person's youth, between beauty and hope, and we will approach it from a perspective that we try to articulate here as that of a “philosophical pessimism”. Our main source for reconstructing a pessimistic philosophy is the thought of Schopenhauer (1788-1960), taken here as the starting point of our investigation. Precisely about our object, he maintains that children's heightened sensitivity to beauty fosters the hope that the future will be beautiful, and that such hope inevitably turns to disillusionment with the arrival of youth and the growing realization that life in space and time is actually vain. Some interpretive currents accuse such a conclusion of being subjectivist: it would derive from the melancholic state of mind of this author, it would only spread in a society depressed by a mood similar to his, and would not sustain itself outside the concepts of his doctrine of the Will. We will complement our approach with the analysis of the premises that the Brazilian philosopher Matias Aires (1705-1763) lists when sustaining practically the same conclusion as Schopenhauer; thus, taking into account that these authors wrote in completely different contexts and conceptual languages, and that one never knew the other's thinking, we will adopt a pessimistic and philosophical point of view that is objective, detached of an individual or collective mood, or of any specific doctrine.