Hope, Tempered by Realism

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Hope, Tempered by Realism

Hopeful Pessimism, Mara van der Lugt, Princeton University Press, 2025, Oxford & Princeton, HB, 255pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

According to Max Weber, the development of religions all over the world was predicated on one pertinent question, to wit, “how is it that a power which is said to be at once omnipotent and kind, could have created such an irrational world of underserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity” (see his Politics as a Vocation). As Mara van der Lugt, lecturer in Philosophy, St Andrews, records in her opening chapter, so-called optimists, notably Leibniz, argued the toss with pessimists such as Hume, Voltaire and Schopenhauer, the “most famous pessimist of all’. The latter’s focus, as the author points out, was not on the issue of whether the world is getting better or worse, i.e. our expectations of the future but on the value of existence itself. Contra the Book of Genesis, Schopenhauer maintained that “the world is very bad, that suffering is at the very heart of things, that the world is something that should not be”. In short, it would have been better not to have been born.

Mara van der Lugt’s analysis of the triad optimism, pessimism and fatalism is discussed throughout in relation to the climate crisis, that “great collective darkness hotly blocking out the sun” (Hopeful Pessimism, p54). The future, especially for young people, has become ‘uncertain territory’, in her estimation. Mankind faces a “truly existential” threat, and in these circumstances unalloyed optimism is otiose. Yet our culture requires the latter “at any cost” and treats pessimism as a vice. The author, for one, dismisses what she terms “the duty of optimism”. Indeed, she contends that “in an age of climate crisis and ecological devastation”, in which numerous species are facing imminent extinction, some measure of pessimism and despair is rational and justified. Indeed, one of her favourite targets is “over-optimism”, the misplaced confidence that technology will somehow solve the problem of global warming. Another is what Naomi Klein, in an implicit attack on Donald Trump, calls “climate barbarism”. The latter is depicted as a “toxic ideology” that recognises that climate change is real, but which endorses the continued exploitation of fossil fuels by “one’s preferred in-group”. It also seeks to keep out supposedly inferior elements whose homes are already beginning to become uninhabitable.

How to steer a course between the Charybdis of vacuous optimism and the Scylla of defeatism and despair? One of Dr van der Lugt’s guides here is Albert Camus, who proposed what she calls “a fierce philosophy of action stripped from any confidence of victory”. There is only one serious philosophical problem, Camus states in Le Mythe de Sisyphe; essai sur l’absurde (1942), that of suicide. But as Joshua Foa Dienstag notes in Pessimism; Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006), Camus’ pessimism “pointed towards an engagement with, rather than a retreat from, politics”. Active in the French Resistance, he considered opposition to tyranny justified by considerations of justice and solidarity, regardless of the prospects of success. In the journal Combat, September 1945, he dismissed the “puerile” idea that “a pessimistic philosophy is necessarily one of discouragement”. The Warsaw ghetto uprising of Spring 1943, doomed to failure, furnishes an analogous example. For the author, “the great danger to be resisted…[is] resignation and inertia in the face of evil and injustice” (Hopeful Pessimism, p33).

The ancient Greeks and Romans harboured reservations about hope, often characterised as blind. The Stoics considered it a form of desire, and therefore a lure. In Parerga and Paralipomena, in similar vein, Schopenhauer opined that to hope is to confuse the wish for an event with its probability. And in Human, All too Human, Nietzsche, referring to the fable of Pandora’s box, remarked that what ” …Zeus intended was that man, notwithstanding the evils oppressing him, should continue to live and not rid himself of life… For this reason he bestowed hope upon man”. What we need today, all things considered, is hope tempered by realism. We commend Mara van der Lugt’s eloquent and thought provoking book.

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review