(Possibly) Optimistic Thoughts on Optimism and Pessimism
In starting this blog, I had a train of thought in mind, and had already drafted what I thought was going to be the second entry (on some of the invisibles that we have a hard time seeing) before I even posted the Introduction. But, as Robert Burns reminded us about “best laid plans”, I awoke the next morning with the realization that there was a postscript or a conclusion to the Introduction clamoring to come out, that to some extent I had written what psychologists call a “projective” test, one that stimulates the projection of un-articulated, even hidden, feelings by whoever is taking the test, and I would like here to address two of those possible feelings, specifically those of optimism and pessimism.
Is Ralph Gaines’ quote optimistic, and is William Carlos Williams’s pessimistic – or the reverse? That is pretty much up to you to decide, but I think that I need to explore those two perspectives before we move on.
I have sometimes heard, or read, that someone had reason to be optimistic, or to be pessimistic, almost as if they might be able to consciously decide which to be, based on a careful assessment of the situation at hand. I am not sure about that, at all. To me, someone might be “hopeful” or, perhaps, “doubtful”, but it also seems to me that most of the time, when we use the words “pessimistic” and “optimistic”, we are referring to more deep-seated, more subconscious and core tendencies, about how a given person feels about things. In other words, they are not so much out in the universe to be discovered, but are in our minds, in our personalities, and are therefore personal and individual.
When we get into that territory, however, we become involved in different perceptions and expectations, actual or subliminal feelings of happiness, and other personal tendencies (there are many ways of being in the word, all of them only partial expressions of what we might consider to be “human”), any one of which might appear, to others, at least, to be inconsistent with reality. But is there no sense to be made here, some basis for people to share thoughts and perspectives?
Julian L. Ross explored this issue at some length in his excellent little 1949 book, Philosophy in Literature. He points out that the difference between “optimism” and “pessimism” is not the same as the difference between happiness and unhappiness, nor is it the same as the difference between self-satisfaction [his term – I believe most people now simply say “satisfaction”] and discontent.
As for the first declaration, he writes (p.188) that “the paradoxical nature of the problem appears in the fact that an optimist is frequently sad, while a pessimist may thoroughly enjoy life,” which is explainable, he says, by the inevitable discrepancies between what our expectations about life are and what we actually receive [or, and this is my aside, what we think we are receiving, or what we are due]. Happiness is an emotional matter. And as far as our expectations are concerned, I believe that I can safely assume that almost all of us are familiar with how “out of joint” our own expectations can be with reality.
Ross proceeds from that opening discussion to write that a philosophical discussion of pessimism and optimism needs to be rather more inclusive, taking, at its greatest extent, the universe as a whole, and that what that means for this discussion is whether the structure of the universe, such as it is, and such as we have to accept as it is, allows for more good, actual and potential, for the human race, or more bad. An optimist, he says, would conclude in favor of the first, and a pessimist, the second.
But that is not the end of the discussion, for he next points out although we pretty much have to accept the universe as we find it, whether we feel that what is there is “good” or “bad” are, in my words, human value judgments, not facts, and are therefore not absolute judgments, but need some standard, or reference point. “[F]or a human thinker,” he then continues, “that standard must be the development of human personality,” and we therefore have to use such values as intelligence, love, beauty, and justice, as our standards in making our judgments. His final definition of the terms (p. 190), then, is that if “we conclude that there is in reality the possibility that human values can maintain and develop themselves, we are optimists; if not, we are pessimists.” In other words, if we are doing more than marking time while we are here, if we feel that we can be here for a realizable reason or reasons while we are alive, then we are optimists, and if we feel that we can’t, or that it doesn’t make a difference whether we do or not, then we are pessimists.
Questions
Do you feel that Julian Ross’s discussion of pessimism and optimism had merit? Did it at least stimulate your own thinking? Do you think that his thoughts have relevance today?
Are you a pessimist or an optimist, and why do you think so?
Half-empty, half-full
After that somewhat serious discussion, I think that a little respite is in order. In his early discussion of this topic, Ross makes reference to the old saw about pessimists as seeing a glass with water at the midpoint as being half-empty, while an optimist sees it is half-full. My rejoinder is that the half-empty – half-full paradigm is not about pessimism and optimism at all, but about newness, and everything that comes with that. Moreover, I believe that one could make the argument that if it were about pessimism and optimism, we might even argue for the reverse interpretation—in other words, that someone who sees a glass as half empty is in reality more optimistic, and that someone who sees it as half full is being pessimistic.
And here is that argument: If someone says that a glass is half-empty, then it is not outlandish to conclude that there was once, perhaps very recently, more water in the glass, even perhaps that it was full to start with. And if it was full to start with, it is not such a stretch to conclude that there is more water where that water came from. If, on the other hand, someone says that the glass is half-full, the not outlandish implication that might be inferred is that that is all the water there was to start with, and even, perhaps, that there is no more where that came from. Which one of these would you say is more “optimistic”, and which more “pessimistic”?
Deeply pondering this most important of questions for many hours (I dare to admit), it seems to me that it is our incessant longing for all of the latent and inherent possibilities that come, almost as a form of ontology, as part of our always-reaching being, with new situations: a “half-full” glass represents a situation with all of those latent and inherent possibilities intact, still open to be explored, whereas a “half-empty” glass has already been tasted from, and that makes a serious dent, in our psyches, in the store of possibilities that had been there just before we took those first sips; that is likely the same mechanism at work when a new car loses one-third of its value as soon as it is driven off the showroom floor. (And it may or may not be related to the importance of virginity at marriage for women in many traditional cultures.)
When we feel nostalgic about a situation or place in our past, it is not, I feel, solely about the specific events that took place, or the specific feelings we remember having at the time, but also includes all of the possibilities that we sensed were pregnant in the situation, many even looked forward to with eager, not to say giddy, anticipation, but which were never, the mean part of reality, actualized, never even realizable. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t realistically realizable; what matters is that they weren’t realized, and that too, I feel, is part of our feelings of nostalgia.
Taking the realities of human life as we know that it has evolved, including, in particular, the existence of pain, of pleasures, of loss and death, of some level of social life, of rest, of tedium, and of laughter, and anguish, and of joy, I would have to say that at least on the level of my individual life, that I am an optimist, using Ross’s definition. I definitely have the biological and mental capacity to have some pleasures in life, even in very tough circumstances, and as long as my mind and my sense of the basic equality of others are reasonably intact, I can always grow, and I can do something to help someone else. I may not have gotten what I had wanted out of life, but that is another matter altogether, a matter of my preconceptions about what life had “promised”, or what was actually possible; as far as I can see now, with a few years of hindsight, it only promised, only was able to promise, the things I itemized at the beginning of this paragraph. Hence (and I did not realize this at the time that I did it) the inclusion of the Ralph Gaines quote - if I can be more aware of what is there and what is possible, then I definitely will be better able to do some things that I would at an earlier time have considered impossible. Maybe I’m just talking about growth, but still…
Having said that, I would also have to admit that as far as whether I am an optimist about what we humans collectively can do about our present and future, I am not so sure about that. As individuals, we may have been “granted” all the capacities that I itemized above, but what we have been endowed with by biology and evolution as far as living together and preparing for the future are concerned, these are much less clearly well-developed. For one thing, our large-scale population centers, and our extraordinary technical skills have developed since we developed conscious minds, which greatly altered the way that evolution works with us; the social skills that we were endowed with would seem to be pretty rudimentary, and as far as our time horizons are concerned, we are still primarily living in the biological time frame where the criterion is whether we survive long enough to send forth another generation and to take care of it only as long as it takes for it to fend for itself and stay alive, and that time frame is oriented basically around getting through each day to get to the night, to get to the next day, with a minor time scaling of eating and drinking, and a somewhat weaker longer-term scaling of seasons.
These would seem to not give us many tools for dealing with social and technological complexity, getting along with more distant—and often very different—peoples, or thinking very long term, other than a predisposition to keep on doing the same things that we have been doing, and hope for the best. Here, it would seem that pessimism and optimism don’t have so much to do with our belief that the structure of the universe itself does or does not allow for the fulfillment and maintenance of our values, but on whether our own capacities as conscious beings, with our own levels of awareness and commitment to values of our own choosing, will or will not provide a continuing basis for that. On these grounds, I cannot say nearly as definitely that I am an optimist here.
However, on the basis of occasional rays of hope alone, neither am I prepared to say that I am a pessimist. This is an area that we ourselves will have to develop our own tools and capacities in, including, as I think William Carlos Williams was trying to tell us, moderating our desires. I also remind myself that we weren’t promised anything in this regard; biology and evolution only inform us that other things being equal, and as long as the environment and the environmental forces remain reasonably constant, we should be able to continue populating the earth. That’s all we have been promised, if that. What evolution does not provide for is any other than very gross (not refined) braking mechanisms for over-grazing (of resources in general) or overpopulation. How much refinement we put into the braking mechanisms, and how we are able to maintain human values in the process, is up to us. I do feel that we at least have the capacity to think about this, and if we think about it enough, we can change some minds.
** I do not know when William Carlos Williams wrote the lines referred to in the Introduction, but he died in 1963. Five years after that, in 1968, a group of concerned professionals first met in Rome to discuss their concerns over our future; from that meeting grew The Club of Rome, which published its influential “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. Almost 40 years ago. Their website states: “unlimited consumption and growth on a planet with limited resources cannot go on forever and is indeed dangerous,” and they are very much in the business of thinking globally, acting locally,' as one expression used to put it.
Their website is at: http://www.clubofrome.org/eng/home/
Another website that is action-oriented is that of dotearth: http://dotearth.blogs-nytimes.com.
Also, the journal Psychology Today has a site relating specifically to human interactions with nature: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/human-nature.
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