Let me describe the most pointless thing I do.
There is someone in my family I visit every few weeks who no longer knows who I am. He hasn't for a while. He is awake and alert — he'll talk, he'll laugh at a joke, he is pleased to have a visitor — but the visitor could be anyone. I am not a grandson to him. I am a friendly stranger who turns up, and an hour after I leave there is no trace that anyone came.
And I go anyway. I bring the few things he used to like. I tell him the same handful of stories, because it does not matter that I told him last time; for him there is no last time. I sit there and I do the whole thing properly — the way you would do it for someone who was going to remember it, who was going to recover, who was going to be moved by the fact that you came. And none of that is going to happen. He is not going to recover. He is not going to remember. By every ordinary measure of whether a visit is working — whether it helps, whether it registers, whether it changes anything — the answer is no. It is the clearest waste of an afternoon in my month.
For a long time I could not have told you why I did it, and I kept examining the question, because I was suspicious of my own motives. Was I going in order to feel like a good person? Perhaps a little — but if that were the whole of it, I would have found a cheaper way. Was I going because I secretly hoped a visit might reach him, might prompt something, might do some good I could not see? I examined that one closely, because it is the comfortable explanation, and it is not true. I do not expect it to reach him. I have stopped expecting it to do anything at all.
So here is what was strange, and it is the reason for this episode. I was not going in hope — not in the sense we have used all series, the expectation that it will turn out well. I had no prediction. I expected nothing back. But I was not going in despair either. I was not visiting a lost cause to mourn it, or turning up so that I could tell myself I had done my part and stop. There was a third thing in that room, and I had no name for it. I was doing right by the person, fully, with everything I would bring if it were going to matter — and the question of what it would produce had simply dropped out. The doing was the whole of it. The doing was the point.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the eighth of nine episodes, on how to face a future that looks catastrophic. Here is where we stand. For seven weeks I have kept you inside a single choice. On one side, honesty — which kept looking like despair, like facing the worst with open eyes. On the other side, action — which kept looking like hope, like expecting the thing could still come out well. Last week I argued that neither option is safe: hope can be the evasion, despair can be the evasion, and you cannot read off the evidence which yours is. I left you with a question and no position to answer it from. This week a position arrives that makes the boldest claim in the series. It says the choice I trapped you in was false from the start. It says you can have the honesty and the action — the clear-eyed pessimism and the striving — that you can do exactly what I did in that room, act with everything you have and expect nothing back, and that this, not hope and not despair, is how a serious person faces a future they cannot control. It says this is the answer. It is the most forceful position the series has produced. So this week we test whether it is the answer, or the most refined evasion yet.
There is an assumption underneath this whole series that I have relied on for eight weeks and never once asked you to examine. I want to examine it now.
Every week I have presented the argument as a contest between two positions. The pessimist, who says honesty means facing the worst; and the hopeful person, who says you have to keep believing or you will stop trying. And I have spent the series complicating both of them — showing that the despair can be a hiding place, and that the hope can be a sedative. But underneath the contest, both positions agreed on one thing, and I let them, and so did you, because it sounds like plain common sense. They both agreed that to act, you need a prediction. The hopeful person says: I act because I believe it can still come right; take the belief away and my effort stops. The pessimist says: precisely, and since I cannot honestly believe it will come right, I will not insult you by pretending; I will face the facts. Notice what they share. They both think action is powered by a forecast. They both think that if you genuinely believed the thing was lost, you would have no reason left to act. Their only disagreement is about which forecast is the honest one.
That shared assumption is the point I never questioned. And the position that arrives this week attacks it directly. It says: that is the mistake. That is the thing everyone in the contest has taken for granted and no one has earned. Action does not run on a forecast. You do not need to believe it will turn out well to do what is right. And if that is true, the whole dilemma I built for you falls apart, because the choice between honesty and action was only ever a choice on the assumption that action needs hope to fuel it. Remove that assumption and you can be as pessimistic about the odds as the bleakest person you know, concede every number, and still get up and do the thing. Pessimism in what you believe. Effort in what you do. No contradiction, and no bet on the outcome.
And you already know what that is like, because I made sure of it before I said a word of philosophy. The room I sit in, with the man who will not remember me — that is not hope, and it is not despair, and it is not a forecast of any kind. It is exactly this: I do the thing properly and I expect nothing from it. So this is not some unusual mental discipline available only to philosophers. You have done it. You did it the last time you sat with someone who was dying and stayed kind, knowing kindness was not going to fix it. You did it the last time you did a small right thing that no one would ever see and that would not change the outcome, and you did it well regardless. There is a way of acting that does not demand a result from the future.
Now I want to be clear about the size of this claim, because I can feel how persuasive it sounds and so can you, and that is exactly when I become careful. This is the most forceful position anyone has brought into the series in eight weeks. If it holds, it does not merely give the pessimist and the hopeful person a draw — it tells them they were arguing about the wrong thing the whole time. It says the honest pessimist and the person who keeps striving were never opposed, and that the listener agonising over which side to join was agonising over a choice that did not need to be made. That is not a small claim. It is a claim to have dissolved the entire problem the series is built on. So we are going to take it fully seriously. Taking it fully seriously means building it to its full height, with the strongest thinkers behind it, until it looks unanswerable. And then, only then, ask the one question it does not want asked.
But first the build. And it begins with a distinction so simple it sounds like nothing, and turns out to be the thing the whole position depends on: the difference between hope and optimism. We have treated those two words as more or less the same for eight weeks. This week someone separates them sharply — and once the distinction is clear, it is hard to set aside.
For eight weeks I have treated two words as if they meant the same thing. Hope. Optimism. We say them in the same breath — stay hopeful, stay optimistic — as though they were a single attitude under two names. The person who separated them is a literary critic named Terry Eagleton, in a book whose title states the project in three words: Hope Without Optimism, published in 2015. Once you see the gap he opens, it is hard to close again, so let me open it carefully.
Start with optimism on its own, and look hard at what it actually is. Optimism is a temperament. It is a disposition to expect things to come out well — and a disposition is not a conclusion. The optimist is not optimistic because she has weighed the evidence and the evidence came back favourable. She is optimistic the way some people are cheerful in the morning: it is her default setting. Show her bad news and she will find the encouraging side of it, not because the encouraging side won the argument but because that is simply what her temperament does. And here is the point Eagleton insists on, and it is the same point we have made all series: optimism, understood this way, is a way of not looking. The cheerful certainty that it will all work out arrives before the evidence does, and spares you the trouble of facing it. The optimist and the despairing pessimist we met in week one are closer than either would admit — both hold a mood that runs ahead of the facts and relieves them of the looking. One mood is dark and one is bright, but the structure is identical. The forecast was fixed in advance.
So when the pessimist dismisses hope — when the clear-eyed person says spare me the hope, it is a sedative, it is denial — look at what they are actually dismissing. They are dismissing optimism: the encouragement, the bright side, the assurance that it will be fine which has not looked at the facts. And they are right to. We granted that weeks ago. But Eagleton's move is to say that the contempt is aimed at optimism, and you have allowed it to attach itself to hope, and hope is a different thing entirely.
Because hope, separated from optimism, is not a forecast at all. It is not a prediction that the good thing will happen. It is closer to a virtue — a way of orienting yourself toward a future good, a refusal to treat it as closed, which does not depend on your rating the odds as high. The optimist says it will be fine. The hopeful person, in Eagleton's sense, says no such thing — he can look you in the eye and say I think it probably will not be fine, and hope regardless. Because the hope was never located in the probability estimate. It was located somewhere the estimate cannot reach.
Let me make that concrete, because it sounds like word-play until you have a case in front of you. Consider someone sitting up through the night with a friend in the worst stretch of an addiction — the relapse, where the odds, honestly assessed, are bad, and everyone who loves this person knows they are bad. The optimist in that room says you are going to beat this, I know it — and you can hear that the line is partly for the speaker's own comfort, a way of not sitting with how bad it really is. Now consider the other person, the one who does not say that. Who says, quietly, I do not know whether you are going to make it. I am not going to lie to you. And I am not leaving. That second person has given up the forecast entirely — they have conceded the bleak reading out loud — and they are the more hopeful of the two, not the less. Their hope did not need the odds to be good. It appeared as a refusal to leave, not as a prediction of how it ends. Remove the optimism, and the hope is still there in the dark, holding the hand.
Notice what that does. It takes the pessimist's strongest objection — your hope is just denial, a refusal to face the facts — and answers it completely. Because the hope Eagleton describes has already faced the facts. It conceded them. It is pessimistic about the outcome and hopeful in the action, at the same time, in the same person, with no contradiction, because the two were never the same faculty. The pessimist's objection was aimed at optimism, and hope was never standing where the objection was aimed.
And now the shape of the position begins to come together, and you can see why I called it the boldest claim in the series. The whole dilemma — honesty or action, despair or hope — rested on the idea that to act you need a favourable forecast. But if hope was never a forecast, if you can hold the clear-eyed pessimism and the hope at once, then the dilemma has no force. You can be the most honest pessimist in the room about where things are heading, and act regardless, and the acting is neither in spite of the pessimism nor a denial of it — it is simply a different thing, which does not depend on the forecast. That is the distinction. Now watch what someone builds once it is in place.
The person who takes that distinction and builds the whole position on it is a philosopher named Mara van der Lugt, in a book from last year called Hopeful Pessimism. Hold those two words together, because every instinct wants to pull them apart. Pessimism and hope. We have spent eight weeks assuming those are the two opposed camps — and she has combined them into a single stance and given it a name.
Here is the stance, at full strength, the way she would want it put to you. You do not need to believe things will turn out well to do what is right. Optimism — the favourable forecast — is not the entry requirement for being a serious person. She would go further: in a world that is genuinely breaking down, crude optimism may be one of the worst things you can carry, because it tells you to relax, it is being handled, the improvement is coming. The virtue for a hard time is not optimism. It is this combined thing, hopeful pessimism, and here is what it asks. Strive for change without certainties. Act for the good outcome while fully expecting that your action may not bring it about, may not be enough, may be overwhelmed by forces far larger than you. Expect nothing from your efforts — and this is the line that matters — expect nothing except the knowledge that you did what you were called upon to do, as a person, in a time that demanded it.
Notice how complete that is, because it answers the pessimist on the pessimist's own ground. The pessimist's whole authority, all series, was honesty — I am the one with the courage to face the worst. Hopeful pessimism does not flinch from the worst. It concedes it. It says: yes. You may be right. It may be too late, it may be irreversible, the situation may be exactly as bad as you say and worse. I will not argue you down a single degree — and note that this is the clear-eyed pessimism, not the flat certainty that it is definitely over, which we already identified as its own kind of bad reading; it is honest darkness, not premature conclusion. The pessimism is real, and total, and granted. And then, without altering the forecast at all, it stands up and acts regardless. Not because acting will work. Because acting is what a person is for, and what your effort produces was never the thing that made it worth doing.
That is the room I described. That is the thing I could not name in the cold open, handed back to me as a philosophy. I sit with the man who will not remember because doing right by him is the thing to do, and what it produces — whether it helps, whether it registers, whether it is remembered — dropped out of the question entirely. Van der Lugt's claim is that this is not only how you visit the dying. It is how you face anything you cannot control, up to and including the whole future. You do the right thing toward it with everything you have, you separate the action from its outcome, and you hold the pessimism and the striving at the same time and stop requiring them to agree.
And I have to be honest about how this lands, because I have felt it myself. It feels like relief. For seven weeks I have been taking things away from you — the dignity of your despair, the comfort of your hope, the authority of the evidence to set your mood, the ground under the question itself. And here, at last, is something that does not give way when you rely on it. Someone has taken the choice that was constraining you — be honest or keep going — and shown that it was a false choice the whole time, that the honesty and the going were never actually opposed, that you can grant the pessimist every fact on the table and still get up in the morning and do the work. This is the most forceful position anyone has carried into the series — and at this point it looks like the answer the whole series has been working toward.
Which is exactly the moment I become suspicious, and I would be cheating you if I concealed it. Because you have been with me eight weeks now, and you know the rule of this show: the more persuasive a thing looks at the moment you most want to accept it, the harder I am going to examine it before I let you. I am not going to examine it yet. I want to build it up one stage further first — I want to take it to the hardest case there is, the case where there is nothing left to be pessimistic or optimistic about, where the future does not merely look bad but becomes genuinely impossible to picture — and show that it still holds even there. Because there was a man who took this stance to a place so dark that optimism and pessimism both stopped applying, and what he did there is either the bravest thing in the series or the deepest evasion in it, and I genuinely cannot yet tell you which. Let me describe him.
His name was Plenty Coups, and he was the last principal chief of the Crow — the Apsáalooke — in what is now Montana, at the turn of the last century. What happened to the Crow is the hardest version of the question this whole series is about, so listen closely, because it is not simply a sad story. A philosopher named Jonathan Lear built an entire book out of what this man did, published in 2006 and called Radical Hope.
Here is what happened, and you have to grasp its depth or the rest will not land. The Crow did not merely lose a war or a territory. The whole shape of a good Crow life ran on two things: the hunt, which meant the buffalo, and a particular kind of warfare between tribes, with its own deep code of honour — planting a coup-stick, defending a boundary, the acts that made you a person of standing. And then the buffalo were gone — not scarce, gone — and the people were confined to a reservation, and the warfare ended. When that happened, it was not that life became hard. It was that the things that counted as a life stopped being possible even to attempt. You could not be brave in the old way, because the deeds that the word brave referred to could no longer be done. The concepts themselves stopped working. Late in his life, Plenty Coups told Frank Linderman — the man recording his story — when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. After this nothing happened. He lived for decades afterward. He means: nothing happened that the old world had a word for. Events kept coming, but nothing that counted as a Crow thing happening to a Crow.
That is where hopeful pessimism meets its hardest test. You cannot be optimistic here — optimistic about what? The future the buffalo were part of is not coming back; there is no version of the old good life on the far side of this. But you cannot even be pessimistic in the ordinary way, because pessimism is still a forecast about a future you can picture, and Plenty Coups could not picture it. The future had not merely gone bad. It had become impossible to picture at all. The categories you would use to call it good or bad were the very things that had been destroyed. This is beyond the pessimist. The pessimist at least knows what he is mourning. Plenty Coups no longer had the concepts to mourn with.
And here is what the man did, and why Lear calls it radical hope. As a boy, Plenty Coups had been sent out on a vision quest, and he came back with a dream that the elders worked hard to interpret — a dream they took as counsel that the people who survived the coming upheaval would be the ones who learned to listen, who took wisdom wherever they could find it, who adapted rather than broke. And as an old man, watching his entire world become unintelligible, he held to a commitment he could not spell out, could not picture, could not defend with a single fact: the commitment that goodness would survive this — that the Crow would come through into some future worth living, in a form he had no way to imagine and would never see. Not "things will return to how they were" — he knew they would not. Not "it will be fine" — he had no grounds, and he knew it. Simply: I will commit, now, in the dark, to the bare conviction that something good lies on the other side of a devastation I cannot think my way past, and I will act out of that commitment even though I cannot tell you what the good will look like.
Lear's whole point is that this is not foolishness and it is not denial. The fool and the denier refuse to face the devastation. Plenty Coups faced it more completely than anyone — he is the one who said after this nothing happened, he is the one who named the emptiness exactly. Denial would have been to pretend the old life could continue. What he did instead took a kind of courage we do not have a clean word for: to look at the total loss with open eyes and still commit to a goodness beyond it, with no picture of that goodness to hold onto. Hope with the content removed. Hope as bare, forward-looking courage, when there is nothing left to be optimistic about.
And notice what that does to the position we are building. It takes hopeful pessimism to the limit and the position still holds. You wanted to say: fine, strive without certainties, but surely you need at least some picture of the good you are striving toward? And Lear says no. Here is a man who had no picture at all, whose world had destroyed the very concepts a life was measured by, and the stance held even there. He acted rightly toward a future he could not conceive and expected nothing from it that he could name. If hopeful pessimism survives Plenty Coups, it survives anything. At this point it appears to withstand every objection. It has answered the pessimist, it has answered the optimist, it has gone to the darkest place a future can go and come back intact.
So let me finally do what I have been promising all night. Let me ask the one question. Because there is a word inside everything I have just told you — a small, quiet word that has been doing an enormous amount of work, and the moment you examine it, this apparently unanswerable position begins, just possibly, to look like the most refined evasion in the entire series.
The word is survives. And beside it, a second word: called.
Go back to Plenty Coups, to the bare conviction that held when everything else became unintelligible: goodness will survive this. I said that was hope with the content removed — no picture, no forecast, no odds. But examine the word survive. To commit that goodness will survive is still to commit that there is a good outcome out there — formless, unnameable, but present, on the far side, waiting to become true. It is the thinnest forecast a person can make. But it is a forecast. It is still an appeal to the future to eventually come good. And here is the difficulty. Take even that away — say not "goodness will survive in a form I cannot imagine" but "there may be no goodness on the far side at all, none, in any form" — and what is left of radical hope? Nothing. It collapses. So radical hope needs the word survives to stand. Which means the bravest, purest, most content-free hope in the series still contains a prediction, at the very bottom, the smallest possible one: some good, somewhere, eventually. The forecast we thought we had cut loose is still attached, in the smallest amount. But the smallest amount is still an amount.
Now the second word. Van der Lugt: expect nothing from your efforts except the knowledge that you did what you were called upon to do. I called that the line that matters, and it is, but not for the reason it first appears. Listen to it again as a pessimist would. Except the knowledge. That is not nothing. That is a payment. The striving was supposed to be separated from any result — and then, in the same sentence, it is handed a result after all: you get to know you did right. You get the clear conscience, the dignity, the quiet certainty that you were the kind of person who did not give up. And I have to ask the uncomfortable question, because it is the one this whole series was built to ask: is that knowledge a byproduct of acting well — or is it the thing you were actually acting for the whole time? Did you separate the action from the reward, or did you simply move the reward somewhere the pessimist cannot see it — out of the world, where results are uncertain, and into your own mind, where the result is guaranteed? Because if it is the second, then hopeful pessimism is not the cure for the evasion we have been hunting. It is the most refined form of it. It is the version that finally places the reward somewhere nothing can take it away — your own sense of having been good — and calls that expecting nothing.
That is the objection. And I want to be as straight about it as I have been all series: I do not know that the objection is right. There is a real reply, and it is strong. Van der Lugt and Lear would say you have confused a byproduct with a payment — that the person in the room is not visiting to feel righteous, they are visiting because it is the thing to do, and the knowledge that they did right is simply what truthfully follows, not the coin they came for; and that to act because a thing is right, regardless of the result, including the result in your own mind, is exactly the honest stance, and the suspicion I am raising is only cynicism that cannot believe anyone ever does the right thing for its own sake. Perhaps. Perhaps that is exactly it, and hopeful pessimism is the clear, hard, honest way to face what is coming, and I am unfairly dismissing the strongest position we have found because it made me comfortable for one segment and the rule of this show made me hesitate. I genuinely cannot tell you tonight. The strongest answer we have found may also be the most refined evasion we have found, and those two might be the same sentence, and I cannot separate them for you.
And there is a reason I cannot, and it is a position I have deliberately kept out of the argument for eight weeks, undefeated and untouched. There is someone who would hear everything I have just built — the distinction, the striving, the bare conviction, the being called upon — and call all of it one more appeal to the future. I am not going to let him make that case tonight; making it is next week's work. He gets the finale: Camus. The last episode, where the deepest objection in the series is turned on this answer, the most persuasive one of all — and where I do not let him win simply by arriving last. Next week the question comes all the way back to you, with no position left to lean it against. That is not tonight.
Tonight you do the work, and you do it on something small and your own, as you have every week. Not the climate. Choose something with your name on it that you have half-abandoned — not because you stopped caring, but because you assessed the odds and the odds were bad, so you let your effort drop. The reconciliation you have decided will not happen. The work you have stopped putting your whole self into because you have privately concluded it will come to nothing. The person you have started grieving while they are still alive. Now ask the night's question. Could you go back and do right by that thing anyway — fully, with everything you would bring if it were going to succeed — and genuinely expect nothing back? Try it. And then, while you are standing in it, apply the objection to yourself, because that is the harder exercise and it is the real one: when you say expecting nothing, is it nothing — or are you quietly expecting to get to feel like the person who did the right thing? Is the reward genuinely separated from the action, or did you simply keep it for yourself? I am not going to tell you which. Some nights it really is separated, and the doing really is the whole of it, and you will know because there is no warmth waiting for you afterward, no small satisfaction of having been good — only the act, and then the next thing. And some nights you will notice the satisfaction arriving, the same way three weeks ago you noticed the relief arriving and last week you noticed the it's fine arriving — early, warm, too quick — and you will know the reward got there before the deed did, and the two were never separated at all. That noticing is yours to do. The same as every week.
And you have a new answer now to the child's question — is it going to be okay — the fullest anyone has offered you: I do not know whether it will be okay, and I am going to do everything right by you anyway, expecting nothing. It may be the honest one. It may be the one that finally lets you off the hook in a way so dignified you would never catch yourself doing it. You cannot yet tell which it is. And there is one more voice coming to make sure you cannot settle it cheaply. Next week, the last week, we let him in.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.