Optimism

Optimism, like hope, is the doctrine and mindset that awaits the best and most positive of everything in psychology, ethics, and philosophy. It is considered in these areas as a current opposed to pessimism.

Concept

Optimism is a psychological and philosophical position that also has an artistic reflection. In a moderate form, medicine has been shown to be good for preserving the physical and psychological health and life of the individual.

History

The word optimism comes from the Latin " optimum ": "the best". The term was first used to refer to the doctrine held by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (Amsterdam, 1710), according to which The world we live in is the best of all possible worlds. A similar position is held with different nuances by the philosophers William Godwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche. On the other hand, the spirit of some spiritual movements, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was identified as optimistic and full of faith in man and his possibilities, in the face of opposing and pessimistic times such as the Middle Ages and the Baroque.

It is commonly believed that Voltaire was the first to use the word in 1759, as a subtitle to his philosophical tale Candide (in which Leibniz's idea is mocked on almost every page). Certainly Voltaire was the first famous person to use that word in the eighteenth century and perhaps also the one who popularized it; he was not, however, the inventor of it. The term "optimism" appears for the first time, in French (" optimism "), in a review of Theodicy published in the French Jesuit magazine Journal de Trévoux (no. 37), in 1737. In that same year, the Swiss philosopher and mathematician Jean-Pierre de Crousaz repeated the word in a critical examination of the Essay on Manby Alexander Pope. Those early uses, like Voltaire's later one, were mocking. In 1752, the Dictionnaire universel de Trévoux approved the term; ten years later, the Académie française includes it for the first time in its Dictionnaire. The term is first used in English (" optimism ") in 1743 by the British William Warburton, in a response to the above mentioned Crousaz examination. For their part, the first to use the term in German (" Optimismus ") were Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, in their writing Pope: a metaphysician! from 1755.

Psychological point of view

The psychological expectation formulates that human affairs will go well despite setbacks and frustrations, which are usually saved by procedures such as humor and resilience. As an ethical value, it is the idea that human beings have of always achieving the best and achieving it in the same way, despite the difficulty that some situations present or finding the good side and achieving the best results. Likewise, it is quite difficult to obtain a universal definition of the idea of ​​good, a concept generally associated with happiness or the satisfaction of all material and spiritual needs, which Epicureanism identifies with physical, emotional and intellectual pleasure.

From the point of view of emotional intelligence, optimism is an attitude that prevents falling into apathy, despair or depression in the face of adversity. The notion of optimism is opposed to the philosophical concept of pessimism. In general, the common thing is that people do not opt ​​solely and exclusively for optimism or pessimism, but both can be alternately found in a single individual or applied to different areas, since the identification with one or the other of them in an exclusive way borders on pathology or psychiatric illness. Similarly, if you go from an exaggerated optimism (hyperthymia and euphoria) to an equally extreme pessimism (hypomania, sadness) without going through a long intermediate state, this indicates bipolar disorder or some type of cyclothymia.

According to psychiatrist Luis Rojas Marcos, the poisons of optimism are chronic helplessness and malignant pessimism. Some philosophers rise up against them as well. Blas Pascal, creator of the calculation of probabilities, pointed out that betting on hope gives chances of finding what you are looking for, but not the opposite, since in that case you lose anyway (the so-called Pascal bet):

You have two things to lose: the truth and the good, and two things to compromise: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your bliss; and his nature has two things from which he must flee: error and misery. His reason is not further impaired by choosing one or the other, since it is necessary to choose. This is an empty question. But his happiness? Let's weigh the gain and loss of choosing tails (heads or tails) over the fact that God exists. Let's consider these two cases: if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Bet he exists without hesitation.

So not choosing is already a choice, and it is a negative choice. Miguel de Unamuno, a depressive, proposes the remedies of courage and hope. Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness (1930), proposed enthusiasm, humor, rejection of negativism, and openness to others. He also pointed out that optimists have a greater capacity for adaptation and survival (and the fact is that he lived to be 98 years old). Helen Keller, blind, deaf and dumb, wrote that:

No pessimist has discovered the secret of the stars, nor has sailed through unknown seas, nor has opened a new door to the human spirit.

Philosophical point of view

From the point of view of philosophy, optimism is the doctrine that expresses that we live in the best of all possible worlds, something commonly identified with various philosophies:

• The Epicurean or Epicurus, who seeks ataraxia by fleeing from pain and seeking intellectual and physical pleasure
• Leibniz's rationalist system and its pre-established harmony.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalism
• Nietzsche's positive and vitalistic nihilism.

A similar position would be that of agathism, a doctrine that defends that all things tend to the good and that this will prevail in the end, although some things may go wrong in the process. Agatology, on the other hand, is the discipline that, within ethics, studies the good or the value that identifies good things.

Artistic and literary point of view

In painting and literature, the opposition between optimism and pessimism is expressed in the topic of Heraclitus and Democritus, philosophers who represent pessimism and optimism crying and laughing, respectively. In this regard, WH Auden wrote that life is resilient and always prevails over any attempt at despair or, as the classic adage says, primum vivere, deinde philosophari:

Solipsists claim / that no one else exists, / but continue to write... for others. /...Behaviorists maintain / that those who think do not learn, / but continue to think... without being discouraged. /...Subjectivists discover / that everything is in the mind, / but they continue to sit... on real chairs. /...Popper's followers deny / the possibility of proof, / but continue to search... for the truth. /...The existentialists claim / that they are completely desperate, / but... they keep writing.