Hope

The Politics of Optimism

Simon Wortham

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350105317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

A colourful map of the current conflict between pessimism and optimism in Western politics and theory, Hope attempts to reveal both the deep history and contemporary necessity of political hopefulness. Starting in the 17th century with Spinoza, Wortham tells the story of the various fallacies and insights of pessimism and optimism through the 18th century with the help of Kant and Voltaire through to the famously nihilistic writings of Nietzsche and the 20th century works of thinkers such as Benjamin, Arendt, Kristeva and Fanon (to name but a few). He explores the contemporary significance of ideas such as affirmation, sovereignty, violence, therapy, existentialism and, of course, the oft maligned notion of 'hopefulness' to create a politics of optimism which avoids the pitfalls of uncritical acceptance of the status quo or the newest political idea. Short chapters written in an engaging narrative manner enable the reader to follow the story of political optimism over the last 4 centuries inspiring a new way of thinking about the transformative uses of hopefulness.

TWENTY-TWO SHORT ESSAYS ON THE POLITICS OF OPTIMISM

1

IMMANUEL KANT

CHOOSING WHAT IS BEST

Two years before it was to be judged, the Prussian Royal Academy chose for their 1755 prize-essay competition the theme of Pope’s optimism. While Kant himself decided not to compete, submissions from Lessing, Mendelssohn and Reinhard (who was eventually to win) testify to the currency of debates concerning this topic throughout the cultural and intellectual world of the German Enlightenment. It was Leibniz’s Theodicy, appearing in 1710, that chiefly fuelled these debates. While in England the optimism of Shaftesbury and Pope had taken its own course during the first half of the eighteenth century, Leibniz’s contention that this was the best of all possible worlds had provoked strong criticism, both in France by Bayle and Le Clerc and in Germany by Wolff, Daries and Crusius. Essays submitted to the Prussian Royal Academy for the 1755 prize were supposed to examine Pope’s cognate dictum, ‘everything is good’. Authors were asked to properly elucidate its meaning and significance, notably in terms of the wider climate of contemporary philosophy, and to establish the grounds for either a philosophical justification or rejection of Pope’s position.

The deep resonance of such debates throughout Europe at this time is confirmed by the fact that their intensity grew in response to current events. For example, the question of optimism powerfully funded reactions to the occurrence of natural disasters such as the Lisbon earthquake, which happened during the very same year that the prize-essay competition was to be judged. Faced with the terrible destruction of the town and most of its inhabitants, Voltaire was moved to abandon optimism. He savages the Leibnizian world view in his poem on the Lisbon disaster, which concludes that Leibniz’s divine creator falls short because as the architect of an already optimal world he denies flawed humanity the very possibility of hope. Widely regarded as a stepping stone to Voltaire’s Candide and his view of the problem of evil (Lisbon also features in Voltaire’s picaresque novel), the poem is brutally critical of optimistic philosophy. While Rousseau had written to Voltaire to contest his position on the subject, Kant had reacted to the earthquake by writing three short texts which challenged the view that philosophical optimism was incompatible with the incidence of such events.

Reinhard’s prize-winning entry, which allied Pope to Leibniz in its criticism of the optimist position, fired more controversy and polemic as the unsuccessful entrants rallied against him, Mendelssohn and Lessing joining forces to malign the idea that Pope’s literary brand of optimism was worthy of comparison to Leibnizian philosophy in their essay ‘Pope a Metaphysician!’ Meanwhile, in 1759 – the year Candide appeared – Kant decided, as he had done in previous years, to announce his lecture course by appending details to a short text on subject-matter presumably chosen to cultivate an audience: this time, a defence of Leibniz’s proposition that ours is the best of all possible worlds. This publication, entitled ‘An Attempt at Some Reflections on Optimism’,¹ no doubt prompted by texts and events in the wake of 1755, in turn provoked hostile reaction as another scholar, Daniel Weyman, misconstrued its contents as a direct attack on his own recently completed thesis on the topic, publishing a fierce attack on Kant within days its appearance (one Kant chose to ignore).

Kant begins his essay with the apparently simple idea that ‘if God chooses, he chooses only what is best’ (71), but makes it clear from the outset that his intention is to re-establish optimism by tackling the main objections to Leibniz’s thesis. This defence happens on two fronts. First, Kant refutes as ‘erroneously employed’ recourse to the mathematical idea of number, whereby the greatest possible figure imaginable can always be increased by addition, which allows its proponents to dispute the Leibnizian contention that this is the best of all possible worlds: on the mathematical parallel, of course, there could always be a better one. Since from this perspective the notion of the greatest possible number is effectively incoherent or ‘self-contradictory’, so by analogy is that of the most perfect world. If such arguments imply the prospect of possible and perhaps necessary improvement – as Kant puts it, ‘a constantly continued and ever possible augmentation’ which one might suggest drove a great deal of both philosophical and political thought in the centuries to come – Kant argues instead that the finite nature of the world should be understood less in terms of privation or lack, than in terms of an essential distinction through which only God is infinite. Leibniz’s thesis should, thus, be tested according to the degree of ‘reality’ of our world. The world as by definition ‘determinate’ must of necessity appear limited if viewed through the mathematical lens, whereas ‘the disparity between infinite reality and finite reality is fixed by means of a determinate magnitude which constitutes their difference’ and indeed establishes the concept of God (74). Hence, the finite nature of the real world – or, rather, world as ‘real’ – does not provide the grounds to reject Leibniz’s thesis.

Second, Kant dismisses the argument which predicates the theoretical possibility of parallel worlds of equal perfection. Faced with this prospect, one would struggle to make the case that our world was indeed the best of all possible worlds. However, Kant argues that worlds could only be distinct and discrete on condition that their degree of perfection or ‘reality’ differs, otherwise in effect they would be the same world. From this point of view, therefore, the theoretical postulation of other worlds serves to reinforce rather than undermine arguments about the best world possible.

These technical philosophical refutations of the principal objections to Leibniz are followed in the last pages of the essay by a much simpler and less ‘scholarly’ justification of optimism on Kant’s part. A most perfect world is possible because it is real, or in other words because it has been realized. This realization is a matter of choice, its existence testament to a perfect divinity. If the limitations of our world – for instance, the evils that derive from human freedom – actually attest to its deeper reality as ‘the best of schemes’, Kant feels able to write in conclusion that ‘the whole is the best, and everything is good for the sake of the whole’ (76). If freedom is maintained, here, as both an essential good and a worthy justification of worldly limits, it is also, somewhat paradoxically, just the kind of the necessary ‘flaw’ that constrains any desire to seek change or improvement to the whole ‘scheme’ of things. Some might argue, today, that Kant’s decision to detach optimism from the prospect of ‘a constantly continued and ever possible augmentation’ implies a lack of ambition on his part about collective human betterment; here, it would doubtless be telling that the preservation of individual freedom itself implies a certain inertia, politically speaking. Meanwhile, Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ – perhaps the most notable expression of the optimism which the 1755 prize-essay competition sought to investigate – famously argues that if the reader were only to grasp the bigger picture, order, balance, harmony and reason would be seen to prevail. ‘The bliss of man’ is ‘not to act or think beyond mankind’, concludes Pope, since ‘man’s as perfect as he ought’. ‘One truth is clear’, he writes at the end of the poem’s first epistle: ‘Whatever is, is right’.

In an earlier text from 1753, one of three short reflections on optimism that were no doubt prompted by the Prussian Royal Academy’s announcement, Kant had succinctly defined Leibnizian optimism as ‘the doctrine which justifies the existence of evil in the world by assuming that there is an infinitely perfect, benevolent and omnipotent original being’ and ‘in spite of all the apparent contradictions, that which is chosen by this infinitely perfect being must nonetheless be the best of all that is possible’ (78). Interestingly, in this fragment Kant acknowledges that necessary evils derived from the granting of human freedom may ‘in the end spoil even the best plan’ (79): if there might be change to this most perfect of possible worlds, it would never be for the better but only for the worse. Good cannot overcome evil in this world, due to freedom’s necessity; but evil, it seems, may nevertheless overcome good. In the last text of this triumvirate, however, Kant criticizes Leibnizian optimism for suggesting that god wishes imperfections in the worldly scheme of things, rather than simply accepting them as necessary – the world is not simply a matter of god’s pleasure, and it is certainly not his plaything, Kant insists (82–83). There is even the suggestion, here, that god may not be able to withstand his own creation. Man’s freedom as a critical feature of the present world seems almost unmatched by divine choice as it confronts its own limitations. If his response to Leibniz and optimism in general seems not entirely free of ambivalence, in later life Kant was purportedly keen that his writings on the subject fell out of circulation. One is left to imagine why.

Nowadays, we tend to think of optimism in terms of the notion that things might improve. Even Pope in his ‘Essay on Man’ ventures the idea that, knowing god’s goodness, we might ‘hope humbly’ for a blissful afterlife, even if in this best of all possible worlds we must expect no better. But this same tension in Pope’s poem establishes hope’s predicament for eighteenth-century optimism. The optimist of the Enlightenment world is perhaps the pessimist of the world that comes after it, epitomizing as they do an ingrained conservatism which those seeking positive change must surely overcome.

2

VOLTAIRE

BIEN (TOUT EST)

While the original plan for Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique took shape during the early 1750s, the first edition was not printed until 1764, when it met with popular enthusiasm but also strong condemnation from civil and religious authorities as a profane and revolutionary book.¹ In the meantime, in 1759 Voltaire’s picaresque novel Candide, ou l’Optimisme, was published, gaining notoriety across Europe as a scandalous work of blasphemy and sedition.² Tutored in Enlightenment philosophy from the vantage point of a comparatively idyllic life in Germanic Westphalia, the protagonist Candide suffers a series of misfortunes which drive him haphazardly across the war-torn and crisis-ridden geopolitical landscape of eighteenth-century Europe, and indeed beyond. In the process, his philosophically cultivated optimism is profoundly challenged by a litany of ills of the day. Faced by the worst human miseries, often on an epic scale, philosophical debate itself is presented in Candide as narrowly pedantic and indulgent, mostly a self-regarding exercise in scholarly erudition and inevitably a futile interlude in the otherwise relentless onslaught of human misfortune. Where the good life does exist – albeit in the fantastical lost country of El Dorado stumbled on by Candide during his many travels and adventures, where the denizens enjoy long-life, justice, peace, happiness, tolerance and wealth – it is far from a part of the best possible world for all, but is instead the insular preserve of a privileged minority, without connection or influence in the wider sweep of seemingly inexorable human suffering. (Such a depiction, of course, carries heightened political charge.) While Candide’s confrontation with the most appalling human agonies eventually leads him to renounce optimism in the face of life’s realities, nevertheless – and tellingly – he begins to revert when improvements occur in his own situation, albeit they come at the price of unwarranted suffering on the part of others. Optimism’s quasi-theodical tendency is indeed to retroactively reinterpret terrible events in terms of an ultimately beneficial outcome, whereby the turmoil and torment suffered by many along the way are utterly disregarded. Equally, even those human misfortunes in Candide which might be regarded as just punishment of the high or mighty usually involve senseless pain and misery for others – usually the poor and vulnerable in their charge. Meanwhile, the deeply pessimistic ‘philosopher’ Martin whom the disillusioned Candide selects as his travelling companion (so chosen, because he is the most wretched and dissatisfied of all individuals) struggles to invoke hope – the missing element of Enlightenment optimism – without irony and despair, and is ultimately resigned to the ubiquity of evil, as if nothing could ever get better. Indeed, perhaps the most troubling feature of Voltaire’s Candide is that opposition or resistance to optimism often partakes of its most salient features.

Meanwhile, in one of the short essays making up Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, ‘Bien (tout est)’ – ‘All is good’ – we find another sustained attack on optimism. Leibniz is lampooned as an indulged, inward-looking scholar so concerned with philosophical argumentation that he remains unresponsive to real suffering in the world. In contrast, Voltaire quotes the third- and fourth-century church father Lactantius Firmianus, for whom Epicurus argues as follows:

Either god wants to remove the evil from the world, and cannot, or he can, and does not want to; or he neither wants to nor can; or he wants to and can. If he neither wants to nor can, this is impotence, which is contrary to the nature of god; if he can but does not want to, this is wickedness, which is no less contrary to his nature; if he neither can nor wants to this is at once wickedness and impotence; if he wants to and can (which is the only of these possibilities fitting for god) whence comes the evil which is on earth? (69)

Of these different possibilities, let us recall, optimism remains poised between the idea of a god who is simply unable to dispense with evil because of the necessity of earthly freedom (this is Kant’s position in one of his 1753 texts on the subject); and the image of a god who, in arriving at the worldly plan which most pleases him, chooses evil as part of a balanced order in the great scheme of things (Kant’s criticism of Leibniz in the same text takes aim at this view, but it is also a standpoint that in his Dictionnaire philosophique Voltaire associates with Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke and Pope). Is it that god would wish to bring evil to an end, but just can’t? This suggests that his powers are limited. Or is it that he doesn’t want to, even though he could? This implies wickedness on god’s part. While Voltaire observes that quotation is to be avoided as ‘usually a ticklish job’, here reference to Lactantius exposes the shortcomings of the optimist position as it hesitates between two versions of itself, both of which imply a notion of god that falls short of the original idea of divine power and perfection suffusing all creation. Optimism, in other words, can only resolve its own philosophical difficulties by resorting to an image of god which proves inadequate in terms of optimism’s very point of departure. Thus, it is as divided as the god it champions.

In his 1753 text on optimism, where the critical note is sounded in relation to Leibniz, Kant as we’ve seen goes so far as to hint that god may not survive his own creation, so beleaguered is he by the problem of evil. If one might be tempted to see in Kant’s predicament the embryo of the philosophical proposition that god is dead, the alternative idea highlighted by Voltaire – that ‘the author of nature’ is simply ‘a powerful and maleficent king’ (73), wholly disdainful of the suffering masses – explains those attacks on his philosophical dictionary that were prompted by its revolutionary flavour as much as its profanity. Indeed, Voltaire’s dismantling of the optimist point of view is undertaken more to invite outrage at its deep callousness, than to expose its insidious contradictions. Indeed, such outrage is provoked on behalf of an ‘unthinking mass’ not schooled in grandiloquent intellectual exercises, those who bear the brunt of worldly sufferings treated as merely a theodical problem by learned proponents of a complacent optimism. Yet in Candide, let us recall, the rejection of optimism involves a certain ambivalence as much as clear-cut opposition, not least through the figure of the pessimist philosopher Martin who struggles to find the grounds on which optimism might be surpassed. To confront the best with the worst of all possible worlds may not alter the terms of debate as much as Voltaire hoped, if ‘hope’ was indeed his aim.

3

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

EATING THE OTHER

In Schopenhauer’s short essay ‘On the Sufferings of the World’, from the last decade of his life, optimism is dismissed as merely the preserve of university professors, once again being seen as an intellectual exercise confined to a learned elite.¹ The essay, appearing several decades after the original publication of The World as Will and Representation in the earlier part of the nineteenth century,² builds on the sentiment found in this major work by Schopenhauer regarding the optimistic world view, where he famously declares:

For the rest, I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of mankind. (326)

‘On the Sufferings of the World’ sees Schopenhauer write that ‘evil is positive’, explicitly reversing Leibniz’s formulation. Since ‘misfortune in general is the rule’, for Schopenhauer the incidence of what is good merely negates the natural or essential condition of things, of which it is far from the dominant or primary characteristic:

Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence. (7)

Nothing gives pause to ‘the will to live which underlies the whole world of phenomena’. Such ‘will’ is incapable of denying itself in the interests of ‘redemption’, but must ‘satisfy its cravings by feeding upon itself’ (10).³ Thus, Schopenhauer writes:

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Hope Against Hope
• Twenty-two Short Essays on the Politics of Optimism
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint