Optimism



Optimism, the opposite of pessimism, exemplifies a lifeview where one looks upon the world as a positive place. Optimists generally believe that people and events are inherently good. They have a so-called "positive" outlook on life, believing that things will work out in the end. A common conundrum illustrates optimism versus pessimism with the question, does one regard a given glass of water as half full or as half empty? Conventional wisdom expects optimists to reply with half full and pessimists to respond with half empty.

Philosophers often link the concept of optimism with the name of Gottfried Leibniz, who held that we live in the "best of all possible worlds," a theodicy which Voltaire famously mocked in his satirical novel Candide. The philosophical pessimism of, for instance, Arthur Schopenhauer, provides an opposite pole to philosophical optimism.

The anarchist philosopher William Godwin demonstrated perhaps even more optimism than Leibniz. He hoped that society would eventually reach the state where calm reason would replace all violence and force, that mind could eventually make matter subservient to it, and that intelligence could discover the secret of immortality. (Some express surprise to learn that a freedom-loving anarchist like William Godwin disapproved of suicide, but his disapproval came from his optimistic view of suicide as almost always a mistake.)

Overoptimism, or strong optimism, is the overarching mental state wherein people believe that things will more likely go well for them than go badly. Compare this with the valence effect of prediction, a tendency for people to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening rather than bad things.

Personal optimism correlates strongly with self-esteem, with psychological well-being and with personal health. Martin Seligman, in researching this area, criticises academics for focusing too much on causes for pessimism and not enough on optimism. He points out that in the last three decades of the 20th century journals published 46,000 psychological papers on depression and only 400 on joy.

Ideologically convinced optimists may defend failures in their hoped-for outcomes by discussing "misplaced optimism" rather than abandoning optimism altogether.

A number of scholars have suggested that, although optimism and pessimism might seem like opposites, in psychological terms they do not function in this way. Having more of one does not mean you have less of the other. The factors that reduce one do not necessarily increase the other. On many occasions in life we need both in equal supply. Antonio Gramsci famously called for "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will": the one the spur to action, the other the resilience to believe that such action will result in meaningful change even in the face of adversity.

Hope can become a force for social change when it combines optimism and pessimism in healthy proportions. John Braithwaite, an academic at the Australian National University, suggests that in modern society we undervalue hope because we wrongly think of it as a choice between hopefulness and naivity as opposed to scepticism and realism.