Abstract

Rustin Cohle, the protagonist of the first season of True Detective, declares that he is "in philosophical terms, a pessimist". The doctrine of "pessimism" espoused by Rust is remarkably similar to the view adumbrated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who holds that conscious life (both human and nonhuman animal) involves a tremendous amount of suffering that is essentially built into the structure of the world and there is no Creator (providential or otherwise) to redeem all of this suffering, by, say, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. Rust finds some grounds for hope, and he chooses to continue on the path of compassion and justice, the path to try to improve the world. This prompts the question of whether he ever really embraced suicide in principle, and just lacked the constitution to pull it off, or whether, like Schopenhauer, he perhaps always found the intellectual grounds for such a radical decision to be shaky.