Pessimism came into general use only in the nineteenth century, although its first known appearance in English was in 1795 in one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's letters.
The first known appearance of the term optimism in English was in 1759, also in reference to the system of Leibniz. Optimisme was admitted by the French Academy to its dictionary in 1762. Leibniz himself used the term optimum in a technical sense that applied to the unique maximal or minimal instance of an infinite class of possibilities, and he held that this principle of the optimum was applied by God in the creation of the world. The term optimisme was first used in the Jesuit journal M émoires de Tr évoux in 1737 to designate Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's doctrine (which appears in his Th éodic ée and in other of his philosophical writings) that this is the best of all possible worlds. Optimistic and pessimistic attitudes and theories are much older than the terms used to describe them. This article will be concerned chiefly with philosophical formulations and arguments for optimism and pessimism with some reference to their manifestations in religion. There is widespread doubt whether the terms optimism and pessimism are sufficiently precise for philosophical purposes and also whether optimistic and pessimistic beliefs are philosophically justifiable.
Philosophical pessimism and optimism result from the critical analysis and clarification of judgments of the dominance of good or evil, an evaluation of the experiences upon which these judgments are based, and the presentation of reasons to justify or refute such statements. Since the issue of the goodness or evil of human life involves belief in beneficent or malevolent forces upon which man's well-being is dependent, optimism and pessimism are prominent aspects of religious beliefs, and these beliefs may involve many or all of the above types of judgments. Four types of reactions or judgments may be distinguished: (1) psychological or anthropological (involving judgments about the dominance of evil or good in one's own experience or in human experience generally) (2) physicalistic (judging the physical world to be dominantly evil or good) (3) historicistic (based on appraisals of the evil or goodness of a historical or cultural period or of the forces and institutions that determine history) and (4) universal, or cosmic (involving judgments about the dominance of evil or good in the universe as a whole). As such they vary with the temperaments and value experiences of individuals, and with cultural situations far more than with philosophical traditions.īoth pessimism and optimism in the above sense may be reactions to experiences that vary in scope and content.
"Pessimism" and its opposite, "optimism," are only secondarily philosophical theories or convictions primarily they are personal opinions or attitudes, often widely prevalent, about the relative evil or goodness of the world or of men's experience of the world.
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