A former chair of the VGS writes: “I am reading Terry Eagleton’s ‘Hope without Optimism’ which is a sound response to our world in my view.”
In a book review from the TLS on Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton we are introduced to the challenge that: “Hope is constitutionally connected with uncertainty, but when does hope become naive or delusory, and thereby cease to be a virtue?”
To quote another reviewer, looking at hope without optimism, action without hope?, Eagleton’s response in a nutshell would be that: “Optimism is the naive belief that things will get better. Hope is the projection of self into a discernible future; even if that future is illusory, it provides a drive and an architecture for change.”
For more, here’s the blurb from the publisher of Hope Without Optimism:
“In a virtuoso display of erudition, thoughtfulness and humour, Terry Eagleton teases apart the concept of hope as it has been (often mistakenly) conceptualised over six millennia, from ancient Greece to today. He distinguishes hope from simple optimism, cheeriness, desire, idealism or adherence to the doctrine of Progress, bringing into focus a standpoint that requires reflection and commitment, arises from clear-sighted rationality, can be cultivated by practice and self-discipline, and which acknowledges but refuses to capitulate to the realities of failure and defeat. Authentic hope is indubitably tragic, yet Eagleton also argues for its radical implications as ‘a species of permanent revolution, whose enemy is as much political complacency as metaphysical despair’. It is a means of facing the future without devaluing the moment or obviating the past.
“Traversing centuries of thought about the many modes of hoping – from Ernst Bloch’s monumental work through the Stoics, Aquinas, Marx and Kierkegaard, among others – this penetrating book throws new light on religious faith and political ideology as well as issues such as the problem of evil, the role of language and the meaning of the past. Hope Without Optimism is a brilliantly engaged, impassioned chronicle of human belief and desire in an increasingly uncertain world.”
Or for more, of course, we can read Eagleton’s very readable original.