Respair and Meliorism
Some mornings, if I wake up earlier than I want to get up, and my wife is still asleep, I scroll through Are.na's Explore page. It's pretty much the only time I mindlessly scroll through an infinite page, but it's so useful in terms of some of the gems I would never otherwise come across.
For example, I have no idea who Crookshanks is, nor where they found this quote:
“..she learned the word respair - an obscure English word meaning the recovery of hope after despair”
But I do like the word "respair" which, on further investigation turns the OED describes as not "obscure", but obsolete:
The only known use of the noun respair is in the early 1500s.
OED's only evidence for respair is from before 1525, in the writing of Andrew of Wyntoun, prior of St Serf's, Lochleven, and historian.
It is also recorded as a verb from the Middle English period (1150—1500).
There's also an episode of the A Way With Words podcast about the word, to which I'm looking forward to listening.
This took me to Meliorism which sounded familiar - no wonder, as William James (one of my philosophical heroes) was an adherent:
Meliorism (Latin melior, better) is the idea that progress is a real concept and that humans can interfere with natural processes in order to improve the world.
Meliorism, as a conception of the person and society, is at the foundation of contemporary liberal democracy and human rights and is a basic component of liberalism.
Another important understanding of the meliorist tradition comes from the American Pragmatic tradition, which can be found in the works of Lester Frank Ward, William James, and John Dewey. In James' works, however, meliorism does not point to progressivism and/or optimism. For James, meliorism stands in the middle between optimism and pessimism and treats the salvation of the world as a probability rather than a certainty or impossibility. In the case of a meliorist praxis, the activist contemporary of the Pragmatists Jane Addams stripped progressive ideals of any elitist privilege, calling for a "lateral progress" whose concern was squarely with the common people.
Are.na block: ↗
Collection: finds-au723pdfugg