[lit-ideas] Re: Mike and Schopenhauer
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 09:28:04 -0400
I think as regards my own pessimism, I don't think it's pessimism. I think
it's realism. In the history of the world nothing has fundamentally
changed except to get worse. Ironically, I am an optimist because I think
humans are perfectible through vastly and universally improved parenting
combined with substituting nurturing for obliteration. Unfortunately,
these concepts will never ever happen. Therein lies the realism and the
pessimism. Our short stay on this little planet is driven by corruption of
our own making and endorsement, and we fight to the death to have it no
other way.
I'm curious. Would an optimist simply ignore these facts? Ignore them and
they will go away? Be in the world but not of it? Ignorance might be
bliss in a non-war area,.but how does one do it a war area, which is a lot
of area, or when one has to be a child who lives through the terror and
atrocities found in most of the world? Clearly optimism can only happen if
one doesn't look at the big picture. Optimism is a very very local
condition. Born of denial I think.
> [Original Message]
> From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 5/22/2006 11:14:32 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Mike and Schopenhauer
>
> 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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