Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism

Abstract

Hope without OptimismTerry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015)Isaiah Berlin famously identified two kinds of thinkers: fox, who knows many small things, and hedgehog, who knows one large thing. In Hope without Optimism Eagleton tarries with both. In his rapid-fire style Eagleton rarely dwells on a single notion of for more than a few lines as reader is carried through a myriad of fragmented attempts discern light in through art, theology, philosophy, and politics. book's scope is enormous, ranging from ancient Greeks Stoics, Aquinas, Marx, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, and Bloch. In midst of Eagleton's critique of those who find our greatest cause in an unrealized or a humanist project of self-realization emerges a deeper meaning of what it means hope, one that arises from clear-sighted vision and is cheaply won. In this sense Hope without Optimism is a disquieting book. It forces reader face scattered wreckage of past in order salvage a grounded on recognition that, while history is indeed a slaughterhouse, things might be otherwise than they are.The rapid movement of Eagleton's argument reflects lecture format of original text. In first chapter, The Banality of Optimism, Eagleton sets out sever connection between and wishful thinking by showing that optimism, like pessimism, is ultimately a form of fatalism (3). One does choose be an optimist but is rather chained cheerfulness as a slave his oar. There is no room for conversation or disagreement with realist, one who sees history as it is: an unfolding wreckage of civilization scattered with fleeting moments of goodness. Optimists are conservatives, Eagleton informs us, because in a benign is rooted in their trust in essential soundness of present (4). (However, two pages later Eagleton states that it is liberals who tend former [optimism], while conservatives incline latter [pessimism].) Bleakness and dissatisfaction are far more powerful goads reform, he contends, for authentic . . . needs be underpinned by reasons (3).Yet there are plenty of progressives who think that optimism can be rational. Take Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist, for example, which promotes a healthy faith in capacity of capitalist markets secure conditions of human flourishing. Eagleton sets out show that the doctrine of progress reifies [hope] into an objective (8). He relentlessly attacks Ridley's Rational Optimist as a contemporary theodicy, a text that coldly informs paraplegic that he should look bright side of life, for his injuries might have been worse. Ridley fails to see only how damagingly past is interwoven with present, but also how it can furnish us with precious resources for a more promising age come (24). It is hubris that threatens us, Eagleton claims, not simply backwardness (16). Hope need be coupled with optimism. As Benjamin's revolutionary historical method has shown us, it is the past that furnishes us with resources of hope (32).In chapter 2, What is Hope? Eagleton examines political dimension of in order refute contemporary left's suspicion of on one hand and right's penchant for on other. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud have shown that, in past, left all too quickly turns past as a mere prologue a in which our desires are truly fulfilled. Such is laced with false-consciousness (43), for it is too easily won. This thesis sets up Eagleton's sustained critique of Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope in chapter 3, which outlines an undefeatable that is divorced from reason. Bloch absents reality from itself (104), failing see that task of leftist critique is precisely excavate past for sake of an emancipated future (106). …