David E. Cooper <i>Pessimism, Quietism and Nature as Refuge</i> (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, 2024). pp. xiv + 168. £18.99 (Pbk. ISBN 9781788217705)

elegant new book defends a pessimistic and misanthropic appraisal of the human condition and recommends to us a style of 'quietism' inflected by a religious sensibility.Readers familiar with his work will find all his characteristic virtuesthe deployment of ideas from global philosophical and religious traditions, an economical style of writing leavened with literary and cultural learning, a judicious combination of analytical carefulness and existential reflectiveness, and a sobering perspective on the forms and possibilities of human life.The interest of this book for philosophers of religion should be, first, the centrality of Cooper's theme of the human condition to many religious traditions.In Chapter 1, the Buddha's discourses are used to develop a general account of the human condition -one from which anxiety and self-preoccupation and other kinds of suffering are inseparable.Unlike modern 'bright-siding' accounts of Buddhism, the bleak picture admits of no easy solution.We 'unenlightened worldling' are all 'burning' with craving, aversions, attachment, delusion.For many Christians, too, our condition is dominated by corruption, concupiscence, and sin.Cooper, in a section offering 'a brief history of pessimism', reminds us of a long history of sombre reflection on our moral and spiritual condition.This includes ways of responding to our condition, including temptations to 'denial' or, better, embracing the mood of 'disquiet' arising from sober reflection on human life (8-18).A second related interest for philosophers of religion concerns the content and tone of Cooper's characterization of the human condition.It is a bad -motivating pessimism and misanthropy in the philosophical senses of those terms: the human condition is a bad one, suffused with many bad features that cannot be corrected or removed, including a dense array of moral vices and failings.Such pessimism is not, argues Cooper, 'confined to a few German thinkers suffering from Weltschmerz', since a wider survey reveals pessimism and misanthropy to be 'perennial perspectives on the human condition, manifest in many philosophical and religious traditions' (12).Granted, there are historical and cultural variations in the exact content and implications for the conduct of life of these perspectives.Zhuangzi, Augustine, Calvin, Cioran, Benatar, and others disagree on the details, but agree our condition is enduringly and substantially negative.A third interest of Cooper's book for philosophers of religion will be the positive recommendation: the cultivation of modes of 'quietism' of a sort informed by Buddhism, Daoism, the Hellenistic, and Christian traditions and various contemporary literary and intellectual figures.In Chapters 2 and 3, Cooper rejects three responses to the dreadfulness