There are two surprises in store for anyone who delves into the concepts of optimism and pessimism. One is that the words themselves are of very recent origin; they were given currency in eighteenth-century France.
The second surprise is that the words come from the writings of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, author of the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds – an idea made famous not by Leibniz himself but by Voltaire’s satirical attack on it in his novella Candide.
This second surprise is no surprise to philosophers, however, who know how many words come straight from their professional lexicon: for example, such words as ‘concept’, ‘idea’ and ‘consciousness’ entered English in the seventeenth century straight from the writings of John Locke and his contemporaries.
Leibniz wrote a book called Theodicy in which, starting from the orthodox theistic premise that the world was created by God, he argued that since God is entirely good, this world must be the best possible world there can be – even with all its imperfections of disease, tsunamis, war and evil. For, he said, all of these things must have been foreseen and planned by God, for whom a perfect world – one in which such things do not exist – would not be the best world, presumably because it would not give the right opportunities to his human creatures to have faith, endurance, helpfulness and the other virtues necessary for admission to heaven.
‘Theodicy’ is the task of justifying the ways of God to man, as Milton put it, and Leibniz was trying to solve what philosophers call ‘the problem of evil’, summed up in the question: how can the perfect goodness of a deity be consistent with such horrors as, say, childhood cancer?
Leibniz’s clever answer has persuaded few; no ordinary father would subject his children to the sufferings and terrors that this world is capable of imposing, even for a few seconds, with the aim (the optimistic aim?) of making them ‘better’ in some way. But in the process he gave us the words ‘optimist’ and ‘optimism’, derived from his use of the Latin optimum, ‘best’, and his claim that this world is optimal even though imperfect. From ‘optimist’ it is easy to coin ‘pessimist’: and that is what the French did, under Voltaire’s influence.
But though the words are new, the attitudes are of course as old as humanity, for there were undoubtedly optimists and pessimists among our caveman ancestors. And that raises an interesting question: since we are here today to discuss the matter, which of those attitudes most prevailed among our caveman ancestors? One cliché (and clichés tend to be true) says that pessimists are realists. Is that how they survived among the sabre-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths?
But another cliché says that optimism is essential to achievement and progress, because, as the psychologist William James pointed out, pessimism leads to weakness whereas optimism gives power. Were our cave-dwelling ancestors mainly optimists therefore?
This dilemma is reflected in the rich tradition of opinions, jokes and philosophical reflections relating to optimism and its opposite. ‘The optimist says this is the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist worries that he is right’ is a standard example of the joke variety.
Bar-room opinion tends to the view that pessimism is the right attitude to take, because experience teaches that if things can go wrong they will, that human life is full of disappointments and anyway leads only to age, illness and death, that the individual is confronted by such massive forces of nature and society that it is ludicrous to suppose he can prevail against them – and so gloomily on. This is described as realism, and Mark Twain said that if anyone was still an optimist after the age of fifty, therefore, there must be something wrong with his head.
But although it is only rational to be realistic, it is arguably rational – and not inconsistent – to be optimistic at the same time. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it neatly by saying, ‘I am a realist because of intelligence, an optimist because of will.’ A realist sees the difficulties ahead, the optimist looks for the opportunities they offer. If one were defeated by the prospect of difficulties, one would assuredly be a pessimist; the belief that difficulties in their own way present opportunities is the characteristic optimist’s response. One is reminded of the tremendous remark by the French poet Paul Valéry, that ‘a difficulty is a light; but an impossibility is the sun’; for the optimist, problems and hitches teach valuable lessons, and offer stepping stones to rise higher or detours to a better road.
From the philosophical point of view there are two good responses to pessimism. If one views pessimism as the habitual expectation that things will go wrong, that effort will more likely fail than succeed, and that therefore there is never much use in trying, one sees it as nihilism, a negative and defeated view of life which makes living less valuable than not living.
This is what Albert Camus had in mind when he said that the great philosophical question is whether or not one should commit suicide; for if one’s answer is ‘no’, this will be because one believes that there is something worth living for – which means: something worth doing and being – which is the optimist’s view. So by implication, the true pessimist has no reason to live. When Winston Churchill said, ‘I’m an optimist; there doesn’t seem to be much use in being anything else,’ he was summing up just this point.
The second response is to see pessimism not as nihilism but, as it typically indeed claims to be, genuine realism, and to accept the resigned attitude of stoicism that this implies. Stoicism is the noble philosophy of classical antiquity which said that we must achieve self-mastery over things we can control, namely our appetites and fears, and that we must face the things we cannot control – the vicissitudes of life – with courage and endurance; because by doing so, said the Stoics, we will have made life not merely bearable but worthwhile, despite everything.
Those who are sceptical about optimism see it as idealistic, naïve, bound for a fall, and therefore more than somewhat ludicrous. ‘There is no sight so sad as a young optimist,’ quipped Twain. And yet when one considers the characteristic optimist’s response as described above – the one that finds opportunity in difficulty – one sees that it explains why most achievements, most progress, most new companies, most buildings, most great careers, all began with optimism, that ‘journey to somewhere that started from nowhere with little or nothing’.
For even if it were true that most lives and their ambitions end in failure, that would not be a reason for not trying. It would be a reason for being more thoughtful and careful, better prepared, equipped with plans B and C, fortified by courage, determined to hold one’s nerve, to keep trying, to learn from mistakes and defeats: all of which is the very stuff of life itself, and is what makes life worth living. Which is in short to say: that what makes life worth living is optimism.