So for school I have to type a paper over Helen Keller's essay, The Practice of Optimism and it actually brought to my attention some interesting comments on the people that inhabit out world. Now, obviously, due to the title, Helen is going to side with optimism over pessimism, however I don't necessarily agree with her.
She constantly seems to exaggerate in her comparisons between the two trains of thought ending with optimism improving the world and pessimism "retarding" it. To me this doesn't seem either reasonable or logical. For her opinion to actually work peoples' minds would have to be one hundred percent of either or, which by the way isn't possible. Helen constantly reiterates the same points over and over throughout her essay and just rephrases it with different people. She does have some good points, I just don't think it should be taken as fact, and far from it. The paper is obviously he opinion, but she does have some good points.
I personally believe that everyone has a combination of both pessimistic and optimistic qualities. As for myself, I'm more of a pessimist, but only with thoughts concerning myself. What about you all? Are you a pessimist? Optimist? What's your opinion between the two?
I try to balance the two. Running to either extreme would be foolish. Either you would be hopelessly naive or hopelessly hopeless. But to be hopeful and realistic--that seems to be the perfect balance.
ReplyDeleteI agree, if you read the essay you'd see how she always referred to situations as pessimists achieving nothing while optimists excel in the world. It just gave me some interesting ideas and I felt like posting about it.
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