The Optimism Imperative

In a letter to the Swiss theologian, Elie Bertrand, in February 1756, the French writer and philosopher, Voltaire, described optimism as ‘a counsel of despair, a cruel philosophy with a consoling name’.1 He was not using the term in the sense to which we are now accustomed, that is, to denote a psychological attitude, but in the sense of optimism as a philosophical position. This had been first expounded by the German philosopher, Gottfried Leibnitz, who had argued that we inhabited the best of all possible worlds because God, being all-powerful and all-knowing, was incapable of creating anything less.2 This was the doctrine that Voltaire satirised in Candide, which he wrote two years after his letter to Bertrand, creating in Dr Pangloss a figure that would forever stand as a convenient referent for mindless optimism.3