[lit-ideas] Re: Mike and Schopenhauer
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 20:15:32 -0700
John Wager wrote:
All writing is essentially optimistic.. One cannot write, and especially
one cannot PUBLISH, without thinking that somehow what one says will
make some kind of difference. Even when a philosopher seems entirely
pessimistic, there is still something about "the truth" (as they
conceive it) that prompts them to attempt to reveal it to others. This
epistemological optimism seems more fundamental than any partial
pessimism, and renders all pessimistic authors as suspect.
I've been puzzling over this off and on all day. At first it struck me
as plainly false, for that the pessimist is an optimist through the very
act of exprssing her pessimism makes the distinction between the
expression of optimism and the expression of pessimism disappear. But
this may not be quite right. John says in effect that one cannot write
and expect to be read without somehow believing that what one writes
will make a difference, and that this expectation, which is bound up
with the belief that what one's saying is 'the truth,' represents an
optimistic stance.
Yet if 'the truth' one wants to publish is that 'in much wisdom is much
grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,' and if one
wants that lesson heeded and passed on (so that eventually the world
will believe that all is vanity and vexation of spirit), doesn't this
aim of promoting universal pessimism outweigh the notional optimism of
expecting to be read and understood?
'We'll never get out of here alive,' one note reads. 'Help is on the
way,' reads another. Suppose these are both comments on the same
situation. Is it impossible to tell who is the optimist, who the
pessimist? 'I write, expecting to be read and understood and believed,'
is the expression of one aim. 'I write to tell you the end is near,' is,
I think, the expression of another.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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