Pragmatists and Empiricists often present what seems like an optimistic philosophical and/or theological worldview. They tend to believe the world can be improved through human effort, even if such progress is piecemeal and imperfect. However, such melioristic optimism is challenged in our time as we face rising authoritarianism, war, mass death, and the threat of environmental collapse among other tragedies. In a time when many people feel locked in a repeating cycle of hopelessness, this panel investigates resources for continued hope while maintaining realism about difficult circumstances. Beauty is the common thread that unites the papers in this session as they develop accounts of meliorism as a ethical ideal, a poetic vision of reality, and the capacity to imagine new possibilities in a fragile world.
In Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumous speculative play What Use Are Flowers?, an elderly hermit confronts the destruction of civilization after a catastrophe and struggles to teach feral children the rudiments of a lost culture through the idea of “use.” Asked to explain the use of flowers, he answers: “the uses of flowers were infinite.” I argue that this enigmatic homage expresses a tragic-pragmatist expansion of ‘use’ from instrumental availability to inexhaustible possibility. Drawing upon Jonathan Lear’s idea of radical hope and the prophetic pragmatism of Cornel West, I suggest that Hansberry challenges accounts of ethical survival that depend on the continued legibility of stable value systems. Instead, the play proposes that beauty may protect from despair even when conceptual structures of meaning collapse. This paper will not attempt to define beauty positively, but rather considers it as the condition under which experience may still answer to something beyond pure survival.
This paper discusses the relationship between beauty and meliorism in the thought of Charles Peirce and Robert Neville, with passing discussion of Jonathan Edwards, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey. It argues that all things are beautiful or good, and that this is a realistic metaphysical claim. The metaphysics of goodness, however, does not presuppose that all things will grow together or progress (synechism). Synechism (and agapism) or meliorism present an ideal to guide our actions, but that guidance comes from an appreciation of an axiologically laden landscape, which presupposes the metaphysics of goodness. The paper presents a metaphysical realism (along with an epistemological realism), a cosmological materialism, and a moral or ethical idealism.
Pragmatist thinkers often express a hopeful outlook on the world. This paper argues that such optimism might be rooted in a cosmological aesthetic, that the universe itself possesses an underlying beauty that inspires creative and practical engagement with reality. To explore this idea, the paper examines the work of Etty Hillesum and Alejandro García-Rivera, two figures who demonstrate pragmatic sensibilities in different contexts. Hillesum, a Jewish mystic and diarist who died at Auschwitz, maintained a deep affirmation of beauty and prayerful spirituality despite immense suffering. García-Rivera, a theologian of aesthetics, argued that beauty plays a central role in shaping authentic communities, particularly among marginalized groups. Their thought is interpreted through the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, who described the universe as a “great work of art.” The paper concludes that many pragmatists are drawn to a poetic vision of reality that nurtures hope and optimism, especially during tragedy and loss.