The Comfort Bacon Owes Us and Those Who Collect It

“Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.” The line belongs to Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, politician, and man of letters at the turn of the 17th century, and it possesses the slightly deceptive elegance of aphorisms: it seems to close a debate when, in reality, it opens one.
What Bacon describes is a mechanism of compensation. Prosperity, he says, never comes alone: it drags along the fear of losing it, the envy it arouses, and the new responsibilities it imposes. Adversity, on its part, is not a bottomless pit either: even in the worst-case scenario, human beings find comfort in the smallest details, learn something from the experience, and manage to hold onto the hope that tomorrow will be different. No situation, then, is absolute. Success is not free of cracks, nor is failure devoid of its own light. It is an invitation to moderation and resilience: not losing one's head in times of abundance, not losing faith in the midst of the storm. A neat, almost accounting-like balance between what is gained and what is paid to have it.
The problem—if one must find fault with such a well-constructed phrase—is that this balance takes for granted the existence of a moral symmetry in the universe, a sort of cosmic ledger that gives something back to the person who suffers. Not everyone was willing to sign that contract.
Schopenhauer is the first to break it, and he does so from the root. For him, life does not oscillate between prosperity and adversity as two compensatory states, but between pain and boredom, with no real way out on either side. Where Bacon sees hope as genuine comfort in the middle of the storm, Schopenhauer sees merely a trick of the Will so that we continue suffering without resisting too much. He puts it bluntly: “All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and by nature purely negative... Pain and lack alone are imposed on us in a positive manner. Therefore, when evaluating a life's balance sheet, we must not measure the pleasures enjoyed, but the evils avoided” (The World as Will and Representation). The difference with Bacon is not one of nuance but of architecture: Bacon proposes a compensatory equilibrium—wealth pays with fear and misfortune collects in hope; Schopenhauer maintains that only pain is real, and that hope and comfort are, at best, fleeting truces.
Cioran goes even further, because he does not dispute the efficacy of hope: he disputes its honesty. If for Bacon hope is the engine that pulls us out of adversity, for Cioran it is precisely what prevents us from seeing adversity for what it is. “Hope is the normal form of delirium. We are not cured of it until misfortune has completely devastated us and there is nothing left in us upon which to build a tomorrow” (The Trouble with Being Born). It is not that hope comforts poorly; it is that it comforts too well, and that is precisely the fraud. Where Bacon sees a legitimate spark amid the dark, Cioran sees a blindness we choose because the alternative—looking the void in the face—is unbearable to us.
Leopardi closes the picture from a different perspective: he does not deny that we seek comfort, he denies that nature has anything to do with giving it to us. Bacon's symmetry assumes an order that dispenses fears and hopes with a certain justice; Leopardi observes, instead, an indifferent nature for which evil is simply the normal state of affairs. “Evil is the natural state of things... Hope is the only comfort left to us, but it is also the greatest of the deceptions that Nature has set for man” (Zibaldone). The moderation and resilience that Bacon recommends as a reasonable response to changing fortunes are, for Leopardi, merely the elegant names we give to our need to cover our eyes in front of a fate that teaches nothing and comforts no one: it simply happens.
Placed side by side, these three voices do not refute Bacon so much as they strip him bare. Bacon describes what it feels like to live inside the pendulum between prosperity and adversity; Schopenhauer, Cioran, and Leopardi ask what lies behind the pendulum, and they agree on an uncomfortable answer: nothing holding it up, except our need to believe there is. Perhaps Bacon’s quote is not describing a law of the universe, but rather the only available strategy for someone who still needs to get up tomorrow—which, parenthetically, does not make it any less true for the person living it, though it does make it less objective than its elegance suggests.

Generated with AI assistance and verified by a human to ensure accuracy.