structural:reformatting, information:classification, stylistic:tone
Post-Schopenhauerian pessimism

Some pessimists would assuage the critics by accepting the validity of their criticisms and embracing historicism, as was the case with Schopenhauer's literary executor Julius Frauenstädt and with Eduard von Hartmann (who gave transcendental realism a unique twist). Agnes Taubert, the wife of Von Hartmann, in her work Pessimism and Its Opponents defined pessimism as a matter of measuring the eudaimonological value of life in order to determine whether existence is preferable to non-existence or not, and like her husband, Taubert argued that the answer to this problem is "empirically ascertainable". Olga Plümacher was critical of Schopenhauer's pessimism for "not achieving as good a pessimism as he might have done", and was, as a result, inferior to Von Hartmann's thought on the subject, which allowed for social progress. Julius Bahnsen would reshape the understanding of pessimism overall, while Philipp Mainländer set out to reinterpret and elucidate the nature of the will, by presenting it as a self-mortifying will-to-death.