Hope and Optimism: A Spinozist Perspective on COVID-19
- PDF / 176,999 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 31 Downloads / 180 Views
SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
Hope and Optimism: A Spinozist Perspective on COVID-19 Genevieve Lloyd
Received: 12 May 2020 / Accepted: 8 August 2020 # Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Pty Ltd. 2020
Abstract This essay discusses hope and optimism with reference to current rhetoric around COVID-19. It draws on Spinoza to suggest that much of that rhetoric rests on questionable assumptions about the supremacy of human reason within Nature. Keywords Hope . Optimism . Spinoza . Reason . COVID-19
Much of current rhetoric in response to the global impact of COVID-19 centres on a confident affirmation of collective human well-being, beyond the present crisis. We are encouraged to remember and to celebrate the endurance and resilience that have seen particular communities, and the human species in general, through so much in the past. That insistent optimism finds reinforcement in common metaphors of war—of resistance in the face of a deadly enemy—and of eventual victory. The implicit message here is that the manifest effects of the pandemic should be seen as temporary glitches in an ongoing triumphal story, in which humanity fights back against hostile Nature. Such narratives are meant to communicate—and to instil—hope. However, they rest on a construal of hope in terms of assurance of future deliverance, whatever the temporary trauma or grief along the way. It is easy to be swept along by such rhetoric. The appeal to resilience in the face of adversity G. Lloyd (*) University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
seems appropriate and necessary; and it is difficult to resist—or even to question—the evoking of hope. Yet, there are some grounds for unease in relation to the resolute expectation of future well-being. In an essay published in The Monthly, the Australian writer and commentator Don Watson (2020) has offered an intriguing insight on the difference between hope and optimism in the context of the pandemic. Hope, he observes, is essential for human beings, but optimism is voluntary; and it can, in its assured confidence about the future, be deadly. I want here to explore that distinction by drawing on the thought of the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza. Underlying the current rhetoric of optimism are narratives of perfectibility and of progress, which were articulated later in the history of western philosophy. They draw on assumptions of the supremacy of human reason, construed as transcending “mere” Nature. Spinoza offers an alternative perspective, which can now be seen as an intellectual path not taken. His philosophy emphasizes the interdependence of humanity and the world in which it is shaped, and on which it leaves its own inexorable traces. In the early eighteenth century there was a philosophical version of optimism, which left its mark on later developments in the imagining of assured progress of the human species towards perfection through exercise of distinctive capacities for rational thought. That “metaphysical optimism” rested on the notion of a b
Data Loading...
