This is my response to the following Twitter thread:
I wouldn’t call Wright a pessimist, since he is in alignment with Dewey and Rorty in his boundlessness. I would say he merely doesn’t offer any philosophy of hope. He just states the facts and leaves their impact on hope up to the reader. For me, Wright’s claim that cosmical weather will continue forever, not end in heat death, offers at least a spark of hope; for most others it doesn’t.
This “just the facts” approach to philosophy is widespread, but I’d like to see that change. I hope philosophy will take over from religion the task of generating belief frameworks that inspire hope. Plato did it. So did the Stoics. I’d argue that Siddhartha Gautama originally offered a philosophy, not a religion. Dewey did it and so did Rorty.
I’m not sure Pierce’s asymptotic arc towards perfection is optimistic only because it claims we will never arrive at perfection; we will only approach it ever more closely. To me, optimism entails that we will arrive at whatever destination we hope for. Dewey even pointed out that asymptotic hopes are uninspiring because however close we approach our destination, we are still infinitely far from it.
I agree that guaranteed outcomes don’t inspire us to work towards those outcomes. They are a form of determinism. If it is determined that X will one day occur, nothing I do can change that, so why do anything to bring about X. Some forms of Christianity get around the demotivating aspect of the certainty of salvation by claiming that while the outcome is certain for some of humanity, if you don’t pitch in you personally won’t be saved, you’ll be damned (“many are called, few are chosen”).
Your prompting me to think about this further has made me realize that James did not address this variation on Christian optimism. Some forms of Christianity are optimistic regarding humanity generally, but melioristic on an individual basis: it is only possible that through your personal efforts, that you personally will achieve salvation. I think this is a pretty big oversight by James. Thanks for provoking this insight!
I don’t think there is a simple correlation between degree of certainty of outcome and degree of inspiration of effort. It’s more complicated than that. So I drew a three-dimensional chart of certainty vs possibility, good vs bad, and bounded vs unbounded:
I’ve added in the Materialists and Schopenhauer, which I discuss in Part 1. One might argue that Schopenhauer was certain that humanity would realize that its existence was more bad than good and would end itself, but I put him under the Uncertain column because I have a hunch he was unsure of this outcome.
What I take from this table is that just about any combination can inspire hope in some people, but the more certainty and upside a belief system has, the more hope it has inspired historically. I think, however, that recent history shows that once some people achieve a certain degree of comfort in their daily lives, they are more able to be inspired despite being less certain of a final upside. (I’ll have more to say on this later.)
And my recently realization that James missed the melioristic aspect of the uncertainty of personal salvation throws into doubt his claim that traditional Christianity is completely optimistic. Maybe he was aiming his argument against optimism primarily at Universalist Christians.
All of which brings me to my overall conclusion: hope, as with values, is pluralistic. There will not, and should not, be a universal belief system inspiring hope for all of humanity. What inspires hope will be diverse and personal. This is true not only for retail hopes that we aim towards in our lifetimes, but also for what I call our highest or ultimate hopes. So the philosophy I am creating is tailored to what inspires ultimate hope for me. If it inspires hope in others, that would be wonderful. I’m hopeful that it will. But I’ll be content even if my philosophy inspires as little hope as antinatalism. Actually, if it achieved even that level of success, I would be delighted!
