www.WrensJournal.blogspot.com

Is there a dark side to optimism? Yes, according to the new book "Pessimism" from Princeton University Press:

"Optimism is to time what metaphysics is to space. It projects perfection elsewhere or, more properly, elsewhen. It teaches one to despise the here and now, which ultimately means to despise oneself. Most philosophy today, on the Left and the Right, considers itself to be postmetaphysical— that is, it abstains from condemning what exists from the standpoint of a transcendental realm of perfection. But if Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the origin of metaphysics in ressentiment is correct, optimism must be understood as one more refuge for the tendency to revenge and self-hatred that authorized metaphysics. “The future,” Camus wrote, “is the only transcendental value for men without God” (R 166). Finally it is optimism, rather than pessimism, which is best understood as a negative emotion or disposition (resentment of the present or of time itself). The realm of perfection metaphysical philosophies projected onto a transcendent plane is projected by optimistic philosophies onto an ever-receding future. If we understand the move to postmetaphysical philosophy as a reflection of our growing humanism, we cannot consider this humanism complete until our thinking is postoptimistic as well—beyond the “idolatry of tomorrow,” as Cioran called it (FT 47). This is the path the pessimistic tradition has quietly explored for the last 250 years."

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8307.html