The climate debate is rife with calls for optimism. While temperatures rise and disasters intensify, we are asked to maintain optimism and hope, as if the real threat is pessimism and despair. In this erudite and engaging book, Mara van der Lugt argues that this is a mistake: crude optimism can no longer be a virtue in a breaking world, and may well prove to be our besetting vice. In an age of climate change and ecological devastation, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism.
Drawing on thinkers that range from J.R.R.Tolkien and Mary Shelley to Albert Camus and Jonathan Lear, van der Lugt invites us to rethink what we thought we knew about optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, activism and grief. She shows that pessimism is closely linked to a tradition of moral and political activism, and offers a different way to think about pessimism: not as synonymous with despair but as compatible with hope. Gently yet fiercely, van der Lugt argues that what we need to avoid is not pessimism but fatalism or self-serving resignation. Pessimism does not imply the loss of courage or the lack of a desire to strive for a better world; on the contrary, these are the very gifts that pessimism can bestow.
What Hopeful Pessimism asks instead is that we strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change.
Mara van der Lugt is lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering, Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child? (both 91桃色), and Bayle, Jurieu, and the “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique.”
"Van der Lugt’s main concern is arguably both more farsighted and more immediately pressing than any particular fire or election. . . . For those who feel dread about America and the world, hopeful pessimism. . . offers, I think, what might otherwise be called realism without requiring that one abandon the beauty of possibility. I like, too, that hopeful pessimism demands action, because there are no promises; it banishes wishful thinking."鈥擥al Beckerman, The Atlantic
"Provocative and compelling."鈥擥lenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today
"Timely."鈥擪ieran Setiya, Times Literary Supplement
"Eloquent and thought-provoking."鈥擫eslie Jones, Quarterly Review
“Mara van der Lugt has written easily the best book for understanding the pessimism-optimism divide that clouds and bedevils the climate activism debate. Hopeful Pessimism is a text of profound thoughts expressed with admirable clarity. Highly recommended.”—Clive Hamilton, author of Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene
“A beautiful book on an essential theme. As the dark challenges of the climate crisis remind us, even if we see little possibility that ‘everything will work out’—indeed, even if we cannot see a way through—we must still do our best to be present, to fight for the future, and to bear witness. We owe it to the future, the past, each other, and ourselves.”—Stephen Gardiner, author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change
“Hopeful Pessimism is beautifully and elegantly written, an enjoyable and illuminating read.”—Steven Nadler, author of Descartes: The Renewal of Philosophy
“Beautifully written, conversational without any sacrifice of philosophical seriousness, this is an arresting and original book.”—Ritchie Robertson, author of The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790
