Hope without Optimism

Terry Eagleton

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813937342
• eBook ISBN: 9780813937359
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In his latest book, Terry Eagleton, one of the most celebrated intellects of our time, considers the least regarded of the virtues. His compelling meditation on hope begins with a firm rejection of the role of optimism in life's course. Like its close relative, pessimism, it is more a system of rationalization than a reliable lens on reality, reflecting the cast of one's temperament in place of true discernment. Eagleton turns then to hope, probing the meaning of this familiar but elusive word: Is it an emotion? How does it differ from desire? Does it fetishize the future? Finally, Eagleton broaches a new concept of tragic hope, in which this old virtue represents a strength that remains even after devastating loss has been confronted.

In a wide-ranging discussion that encompasses Shakespeare's Lear, Kierkegaard on despair, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, St. Augustine, Kant, Walter Benjamin's theory of history, and a long consideration of the prominent philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, Eagleton displays his masterful and highly creative fluency in literature, philosophy, theology, and political theory. Hope without Optimism is full of the customary wit and lucidity of this writer whose reputation rests not only on his pathbreaking ideas but on his ability to engage the reader in the urgent issues of life.

Page-Barbour Lectures

1

The Banality of Optimism

THERE MAY BE many good reasons for believing that a situation will turn out well, but to expect that it will do so because you are an optimist is not one of them. It is just as irrational as believing that all will be well because you are an Albanian, or because it has just rained for three days in a row. If there is no good reason why things should work out satisfactorily, there is no good reason why they should not turn out badly either, so that the optimist’s belief is baseless. It is possible to be a pragmatic optimist, in the sense of feeling assured that this problem, but not that one, will be resolved; but what one might call a professional or card-carrying optimist feels sanguine about specific situations because he or she tends to feel sanguine in general. He will find his lost nose stud or inherit a Jacobean manor house because life as a whole is not so bad. He is thus in danger of buying his hope on the cheap. In fact, there is a sense in which optimism is more a matter of belief than of hope. It is based on an opinion that things tend to work out well, not on the strenuous commitment that hope involves. Henry James thought it rife in both life and letters. “As for the aberrations of a shallow optimism, ” he writes in “The Art of Fiction, ” “the ground (of English fiction especially) is strewn with their brittle particles as with broken glass.”¹

Optimism as a general outlook is self-sustaining.² If it is hard to argue against, it is because it is a primordial stance toward the world, like cynicism or credulity, which lights up the facts from its own peculiar angle and is thus resistant to being refuted by them. Hence the hackneyed metaphor of seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles, which will color whatever might challenge your vision with the same ruddy glow. In a kind of moral astigmatism, one skews the truth to fit one’s natural proclivities, which have already taken all the vital decisions on your behalf. Since pessimism involves much the same kind of spiritual kink, the two moods have more in common than is generally thought. The psychologist Erik Erikson speaks of a “maladaptive optimism” whereby the infant fails to acknowledge the bounds of the possible by failing to register the desires of those around it, and their incompatibility with its own.³ Recognizing the intransigence of reality is in Erikson’s view vital to the formation of the ego, but it is just this that the chronic or professional optimist finds hard to achieve.

An optimist is not just someone with high hopes. Even a pessimist can feel positive on a particular issue, whatever his or her habitual gloom. One can have hope without feeling that things in general are likely to turn out well. An optimist is rather someone who is bullish about life simply because he is an optimist. He anticipates congenial conclusions because this is the way it is with him. As such, he fails to take the point that one must have reasons to be happy.⁴ Unlike hope, then, professional optimism is not a virtue, any more than having freckles or flat feet is a virtue. It is not a disposition one attains through deep reflection or disciplined study. It is simply a quirk of temperament. “Always look on the bright side of life” has about as much rational force as “always part your hair in the middle, ” or “always tip your hat obsequiously to an Irish wolfhound.”

The equally moth-eaten image of the glass which is half full or half empty depending on one’s viewpoint is instructive in this respect. The image betrays the fact that there is nothing in the situation itself to determine one’s response to it. It can offer no challenge to your habitual prejudices. There is nothing objectively at stake. You will see the same amount of liquid whether you are of a carefree or morose turn of mind. How one feels about the glass, then, is purely arbitrary. And whether a judgment that is purely arbitrary can be said to be a judgment at all is surely doubtful.

There can certainly be no arguing over the matter, as for the more epistemologically naive forms of postmodernism there can be no arguing over beliefs. The fact is that you see the world in your way and I see it in mine, and there is no neutral ground on which these two points of view might enter into mutual contention. Since any such ground would itself be interpreted differently by the viewpoints in question, it would not be neutral at all. Neither standpoint can be empirically disproved, since each will interpret the facts in a way that confirms its own validity. In a similar way, both optimism and pessimism are forms of fatalism. There is nothing you can do about being an optimist, rather as there is nothing you can do about being five foot four. You are chained to your cheerfulness like a slave to his oar, a glum enough prospect. All that is really possible, then, as with epistemological relativism, is for the two camps to respect each other’s opinion in a rather toothless kind of tolerance. There are no rational grounds for deciding between these cases, any more than for a certain strain of moral relativism are there rational grounds for deciding between inviting your friends to dinner and hanging them upside down from the rafters while you rifle their pockets. Authentic hope, by contrast, needs to be underpinned by reasons. In this, it resembles love, of which theologically speaking it is a specific mode. It must be able to pick out the features of a situation that render it credible. Otherwise it is just a gut feeling, like being convinced that there is an octopus under your bed. Hope must be fallible, as temperamental cheerfulness is not.

Even when optimism acknowledges that the facts do not support it, its ebullience can remain undented. Mark Tapley, a character in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, is so fanatically good-humored that he seeks out the kind of dire situations that would drive others to despair, so as to demonstrate that his geniality is not bought on the cheap. Since Tapley wants his circumstances to be as distressing as possible in order to feel satisfied with himself, his optimism is actually a form of egoism, as are most points of view in the novel. It is akin to sentimentalism, another form of congeniality which is secretly about itself. Selfishness is so rife in Martin Chuzzlewit that even Tapley’s generosity of spirit is portrayed as a kind of idiosyncrasy or a quirk of temperament, scarcely a moral phenomenon at all. There is a sense in which he does not really want his situation to improve, since this would rob his heartiness of its moral worth. His jovial disposition is thus complicit with the forces that spread misery around him. The pessimist is similarly suspicious of efforts at improvement—not because they would deprive him of opportunities for jolliness, but because he believes that they are almost certain to fail.

Optimists tend to believe in progress. But if things can be improved, then it follows that their present condition leaves something to be desired. In this sense, optimism is not quite as bullish as what the eighteenth century knew as optimalism—the Leibnizian doctrine that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds. Optimism is not as optimistic as optimalism. For the optimalist, we already enjoy the best of all possible cosmic arrangements; the optimist, by contrast, may acknowledge the shortcomings of the present while looking to a more lustrous future. It is a question of whether perfection is here already, or whether it is a goal toward which we are heading. It is not hard, however, to see how optimalism can constitute a recipe for moral inertia, which might then undercut its claim that the world cannot be improved on.

Optimalists are as bereft of hope as nihilists because they have no need of it. Since they see no call for change, they may find themselves in league with those conservatives for whom such change is deplorable, or for whom our condition is too corrupt to allow of it. Henry James remarks that “although a conservative is not necessarily an optimist, I think an optimist is pretty likely to be a conservative.”⁵ Optimists are conservatives because their faith in a benign future is rooted in their trust in the essential soundness of the present. Indeed, optimism is a typical component of ruling-class ideologies. If governments do not generally encourage their citizens to believe that there is some frightful apocalypse lurking around the corner, it is partly because the alternative to a bright-eyed citizenry may be political disaffection. Bleakness, by contrast, can be a radical posture. Only if you view your situation as critical do you recognize the need to transform it. Dissatisfaction can be a goad to reform. The sanguine, by contrast, are likely to come up with sheerly cosmetic solutions. True hope is needed most when the situation is at its starkest, a state of extremity that optimism is generally loath to acknowledge. One would prefer not to have to hope, since the need to do so is a sign that the unpalatable has already happened. For the Hebrew scriptures, for example, hope has a gloomy subtext, involving as it does the confounding of the ungodly. If one has need of the virtue, it is because there are a great many villains around.

Friedrich Nietzsche distinguishes in Schopenhauer as Educator between two kinds of cheerfulness—one inspired by a tragic confrontation with the terrible, as with the ancient Greeks, and a shallow brand of heartiness which buys its buoyancy at the expense of an awareness of the irreparable. It is unable to look the monsters it purports to combat squarely in the eyes. To this extent, hope and temperamental optimism are at daggers drawn. True lightness of spirit in Nietzsche’s view is arduous, exacting, a question of courage and self-overcoming. It dismantles the distinction between joy and seriousness, which is why he can write in Ecce Homo of being “cheerful among nothing but hard truths.” Nietzsche had, to be sure, disreputable reasons for rejecting optimism as well. In The Birth of Tragedy he dismisses it in macho spirit as a “weakling doctrine, ” and associates it with the dangerous revolutionary aspirations of the “slave class” of his day.

Theodor Adorno once observed that those thinkers who give us the sober, unvarnished truth (he had Freud in particular in mind) were of more service to humanity than the wide-eyed utopianists. We shall be seeing later how Adorno’s colleague Walter Benjamin built his revolutionary vision on a distrust of historical progress, as well as on a profound melancholia. Benjamin himself calls this outlook “pessimism, ” but one might equally see it as realism, that most difficult of moral conditions to attain. In a celebrated essay on surrealism, he speaks of the urgent need to “organize” pessimism for political ends, countering the facile optimism of certain sectors of the left. There is, he writes, a need for “pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust of the fate of literature, mistrust of the fate of freedom, mistrust of the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust of all reconciliation between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in I. G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the air force.”⁶ Benjamin’s dogged skepticism is in the service of human welfare. It is an attempt to remain coldly unmystified for the sake of constructive action. In other hands, to be sure, this despondent vision might call the very possibility of political transformation into question. Perhaps a certain impotence belongs to the general cataclysm. If this is so, then the worse your condition grows, the harder it may be to alter. This is not Benjamin’s view. For him, the refutation of optimism is an essential condition of political change.

Optimism and pessimism can be features of worldviews as well as of individuals. Liberals, for example, tend to the former, while conservatives incline to the latter. Generally speaking, the liberal trusts that men and women will conduct themselves decently if they are allowed to flourish freely, whereas the conservative tends to see them as flawed, wayward creatures who must be curbed and disciplined if anything profitable is to be squeezed out of them. There is a similar distinction between Romantics and classicists. The Middle Ages were by and large less euphoric in their estimation of humankind than the Renaissance, sunk as they were in a sense of sin and corruption. Ignatius Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces and a staunch champion of medieval civilization, declares that “optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”

Conservatives tend to divide between so-called deteriorationists, for whom there was a golden age from which we have calamitously lapsed, and those for whom every age is as degenerate as every other. It is possible to read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as combining these mutually contradictory cases. There were also those late nineteenth-century ideologues who were upbeat and downbeat at the same time, hymning the virtues of civility and technology while seeing them as everywhere coupled with entropy and degradation, not least in the spawning of a semi-bestial underclass.⁷ Both Marxists and Christians are gloomier about the current condition of humanity than liberals and social reformists, yet far more hopeful about its future prospects. In both cases, these two attitudes are sides of the same coin. One has faith in the future precisely because one seeks to confront the present at its most rebarbative. It is, as we shall see later, a tragic way of seeing, foreign alike to sunny progressivists and grim-faced Jeremiahs.

That there has indeed been progress in the history of humanity can scarcely be doubted.⁸ Those who do take leave to doubt it, a group which includes a number of postmodern thinkers, have presumably no wish to revert to witch burning, a slave-owning economy, twelfth-century sanitation, or pre-anesthetic surgery. That we live in a world rattling with nuclear weapons and scarred by spectacular poverty is no refutation of the truth that some things have grown unimaginably better. What is in question is not progress but Progress. To believe that there is progress in history is not necessarily to believe that history as such is climbing upward. At their most sanguine and self-admiring, the middle classes of an earlier epoch held that humanity was evolving under its own steam toward a higher, perhaps even utopian state. So-called perfectibilism ranked among the convictions of otherwise hard-nosed, pragmatic scientists and politicians. We shall be looking later at a left-wing version of this faith in the writings of Ernst Bloch. One might describe this outlook (though not in Bloch’s case) as optimistic fatalism—a curious conjuncture, to be sure, since fatalism in our own time is more usually to be found in the company of pessimism. The inevitable is generally unpleasant. Whereas the glass-half-full image reduces hope to pure subjectivity, the doctrine of progress reifies it to an objective reality. Humanity for the likes of Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte can cooperate with the mighty laws that drive history onward and upward, or it can obstruct them; but it is powerless to alter their fundamental nature, any more than one could tinker with Providence. Much the same goes for Immanuel Kant, for whom Nature itself guarantees a future of perpetual peace, but does so through such free human activities as trade and commerce. Hope, so to speak, is built into the structure of reality itself. It is as much an innate feature of the world as the forces that shape the anatomy of the starfish. Even if we forget about it, it will not forget about us. It is a view that risks reducing men and women to political torpor, since if a glorious future is assured, it is hard to see why they should stir themselves to strive for it. The kind of Marxism for which a communist future is copper-bottomed needs to explain why it also has to be struggled for.

Extravagant forms of optimism can be morally dubious. Among them is theodicy, the attempt to justify evil on the grounds that good may come from it, which raises end-of-pier optimism to cosmic status. For Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, a poem that owes a heavy debt to Leibniz and deism, evil is simply good misapprehended. If we were able to view rape and slavery from the standpoint of the universe as a whole, we would recognize the essential part they play in the general well-being. Moral protest is really myopia. As a character in Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death speculates, “There is an ear for which the riotous cacophony which deafens us is but a stream of harmonies.” Besides, misery can make a man of you. God, writes the philosopher Richard Swinburne, is justified in allowing “Hiroshima, Belsen, the Lisbon Earthquake or the Black Death” so that men and women can live in a real world rather than a toy one.⁹ Toy worlds do not present us with stiff enough challenges, and thus yield us scant chance to flex our moral muscles. It is hard to imagine anyone but an academic proposing such a case.

Theodicies of this offensively hard-nosed kind do not teach that evil, however repugnant in itself, may occasionally give birth to good, a case difficult to deny, but that it should be accepted or even embraced as a necessary condition of such value. The problem for some Enlightenment thinkers of this persuasion was that the more the universe appeared a rational, harmonious whole, the larger loomed the problem of evil.¹⁰ Such cosmic optimism tends to be self-defeating, since it throws into relief what it finds hardest to accommodate. Those who believe in perfectibility are more likely to be appalled by the prospect of war and genocide than the cynics and misanthropes, who might find in such misfortunes consoling evidence that they were right about human degeneracy all along.

There were those in the eighteenth century who denied the reality of evil, while some in the nineteenth century held that the problem it posed could be resolved by the doctrine of progress. The deist vision could be historicized. Evil was real enough, but it was en route to being eradicated. The notion of progress thus allowed one to acknowledge the undeniable while retaining one’s faith in human perfection. For a certain historicist vision, drudgery and deprivation could be justified by the role they played in the general enhancement of the species. Without backbreaking toil for some, no civilized existence for others. For every great sculpture or symphony, a row of wretched hovels. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Banality of Optimism
• 2 What Is Hope?
• 3 The Philosopher of Hope
• 4 Hope against Hope
• Notes
• Index