In the 17th and 18th centuries, a group of western philosophers

came to clashes, on the page at least, over the age-old problem

of evil: the question of how a good God could allow the
existence of evil and suffering in the world. Philosophers such
as Pierre Bayle, Nicolas Malebranche and G W Leibniz, later
followed by such pillars of the canon as Voltaire, David Hume
and Immanuel Kant, vehemently disagreed not only on how the
problem could be solved—if it could be solved at all— but also
on how to speak of such dark matters.

Some of these arguments of ‘theodicy’ (the attempt to

justify creation) may seem antiquarian to modern eyes— but in
an age where young people question the morality of bringing
new children into the world, they are surprisingly relevant. After
all, the issue is not just about God: it is about creation and,
more specifically, the extent to which creation can be justified,
given the ills or ‘evils’ that are in the world.

The question of creation is urgent for us today. Considering

the great uncertainties of the climate crisis, it is justified to
create new people, not knowing what kind of future lies ahead
of them? And if it is justified, is there any point at which it
ceases to be? Most people would probably agree that some
worlds are imaginable in which creation would be immoral. At
what precise point is life too bad, or too uncertain, to pass on?
In the early Enlightenment, of course, there were no such
concerns for the future of the planet. But there were evils in
existence— plenty of them. Crimes, misfortunes, death,
disease, earthquakes and the sheer vicissitudes of life.
Considering such evils, these philosophers asked, can existence
still be justified?

This longstanding philosophical debate is where we get the

terms ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’, which are so much used,
and perhaps overused , in our modern culture. ‘Optimism’ was
the phrase coined by the Jesuits for philosophers such as
Leibniz, with his notion that we live in ‘the best of all possible
worlds’ (for surely, if God could have created a better one, he
would have done so). ‘Pessimism’ followed not long afterwards
to denote philosophers such as Voltaire, whose novel
Candide(1759) ridiculed Leibnizian optimism by contrasting it
with the many evils in the world. ‘If this is the best of all
possible worlds,’ Voltaire’s hero asks, ‘what on earth are the
others like?’

But really, Voltaire wasn’t much of a pessimist: other

philosophers such as Bayle and Hume went much further in
their demonstrations of the badness of existence. For Bayle,
and for Hume after him, the point is not just that the evils of life
outnumber the goods (though they believe this is also the
case), but that they outweigh them. A life might consist of an
equal number of good moments and bad moments: the
problem is that the bad moments tend to have an intensity that
upsets the scales. A small period of badness, says Bayle, has
the power to ruin a large amount of good, just like a small
portion of seawater can salt a barrel of fresh water. Similarly,
one hour of deep sorrow contains more evil than there is good
in six or seven pleasant days.

Against that bleak vision, thinkers such as Leibniz and Jean-

Jacques Rousseau emphasised the goods of life, and the power
we have to seek out the good in all things, for if we learned to
adjust our vision we would see that life is in fact very good: that
‘there is incomparably more good than evil in the life of men, as
there are incomparably more houses than prisons,’ Leibniz
writes, and that the world ‘will serve us if we use it for our
service; we shall be happy in it if we wish to be.’ Just as the
pessimists believed the optimists were deceived in their
insistence on the goods of life, so to the optimists thought the
pessimists’ eyes were skewed towards the bad: each side
accused the other of not having the right vision.
A large part of the question thus became: what is the right
vision?
One thing that struck me as I dug deeper into these questions
was how concerned both the optimists and the pessimists were
with the ethical assumptions underlying the theoretical
arguments. On the surface, the question was: can creation be
justified? But beneath it, never far removed, lay a deeper
question, a question just as ethically and emotionally imbued:
how to speak of suffering in a way that offers hope and
consolation?

There is not just a theoretical, but also a moral objection

that each side makes against the other. The great objection
that the pessimists lay at the feet of the optimists is that to
insist that life is good even in the face of hard, unyielding
suffering, or to stipulate that we are in control of our happiness,
that we shall be happy ‘if we wish to be’— that this is to make
our suffering worse. It is to add to suffering the responsibility
for that suffering; it is to burden the sufferer with a sense of
their inadequacy. If life is so good, then the sufferer’s trails
must be a case of wrong vision— and indeed the optimists tend
to say things just like that. This is why optimism, so say the
pessimists, is a cruel philosophy. If it gains us some hope, it
fails in consolation.
But on their side, the optimists prove to be similarly concerned.
Their objection to the pessimists is that, if we insist on the
intensity and ubiquity and inescapability of suffering, if we
describe it in all its depths and bleakness (as the pessimists
indeed are won’t to do), this heaps suffering on suffering — and
it is this that makes suffering worse, as ‘evils are doubled by
being given an attention that ought to be averted from them’,
as Leibniz says.
Pessimism, so say the optimists, is itself unconsoling- but more
than that, it is unhopeful.

The question concerning these philosophers, then, is not

just the theoretical one about whether life in general is good or
bad, but also a more concrete one: face to face with one who
suffers, what can philosophy bring to the table? What can
philosophy offer in the way of hope and consolation?
Politicians are particularly keen to insist that they are optimists,
or even to speak of a ‘duty of optimism’
Both strands of thought have the same aim, but they plot
different routes to get there: the pessimists offer consolation by
emphasising our fragility, by recognising that no matter how
hard we try, we may fail to achieve happiness, for no fault of
our own. Meanwhile, the optimists seek to unfold hope by
emphasising our capacity, by insisting that no matter how dark,
how bleak our circumstances, we can always change our vision
and direction, we can always aim for better. Of course, there is
no reason in principle why both roads could not be combined,
each to serve as the necessary counterpart for the other, an
antidote for the poison each draught may become when served
up undiluted. But the fact remains that these earliest optimists
and pessimists saw them as opposed— and in fact we do too:
we still have the tendency to think in binary terms, as if there is
in life a stark choice to be made between optimism and
pessimism, or, in Noam Chomsky’s words, for optimism or
despair: We have two choices. We can be pessimistic, give up,
and help ensure that the worst will happen. Or we cab=n be
optimistic, grasp the opportunities that surely exist, and maybe
help make the world a better place. Not much of a choice.

The last example itself makes manifest the coarseness and

one-sidedness of our use of these terms. Optimism tends to be
positively