Pessimism is captive to an apolitical epistemology. A pure world is impossible, but everything including history can be made better

(Brandon M., Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope: Black Nihilism Reconsidered in Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Warren treats (black) suffering as the central evil of existence, and seeing no way to eliminate antiblackness in its totality or to impose a sovereign will upon the antiblack world, suggests, like Schopenhauer’s ascetic, withdrawal. He counsels us to turn the will away from the world itself, and instead look inward, toward the worldly hopes, strivings, and desires that intensify our suffering instead. Such advice not only unjustly deepens our responsibility for our own suffering, as Nietzsche warned, but reflects, like Schopenhauer, the view that it would be best if the world did not exist. Here, West’s early attempts to develop a “tragic” pragmatism allows for a persuasive response, insofar as its overlap with Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein aims for a therapeutic approach to some philosophical problems. From this vantage, the arguments that Warren musters—from his sense of the irrelevancy of political organization to his broad dismissal of the enlargement of human flourishing occasioned by black political struggles to his paralysis in the face of the unintended consequences of political action—suggest a picture that lies behind his apostasy from political hope. This picture, which ennobles sovereign agency, the philosophy of the will, and an apolitical epistemology, may simply—like the view from nowhere or the fantasy of total consensus—be a picture that holds the pessimist captive. It may lead him to bludgeon the hard-won victories of the world as it is, with the image of a world that belongs more to God than the kind of beings we are. Insofar as Warren tells us that the ethical standard that authorizes his pessimism is the demand that recognition and flourishing, love and meaning, be placed “beyond extant structures of violence and destruction,” and constructed upon foundations of self and society that are not “subject to shift, transform[ation], and decay,” this is a standard of purity that is beyond any possible world, for blacks or anyone else.95 This lurking ideal of purity and perfection authorizes the judgment of everything in history as profane and ironic and is, in the last instance, the most sweeping source of nihilism in Warren’s account. If, as West argues, nihilism demands a “politics of conversion,” one essential and under-emphasized element of it must be about uprooting these fears, of ourselves and the world, that are reflected in such attachments to permanence and purity. Such a politics of conversion must aim, at bottom, to cultivate an ethos of care for the plurality, agency, and natality that makes life worth living, and the world worth our concern precisely because of our tragic fragility and finitude.96 It does so, not simply through critique but through critique and praxis. 97 For West, even historical “evidence is dynamic, it is not static. It can be changed based on what we do.”98 The defense of political hope this mode of historical imagination engenders, contra Warren, is not rooted in optimism but the epistemic humility of tragedy. As West writes, “the decline and decay in American life appears, at the moment, to be irreversible; yet it may not be. This slight possibility—the historic chance that a window of opportunity can be opened by our prophetic thought and action— is, in part, what keeping faith is all about.”99 We do not lack for voices of those who claim to see nothing but darkness, in the past and on the horizon, but as West argues, “sometimes you have to create the light.” The light—a metaphor that opens Arendt’s Men in Dark Times—“is concretized, exemplified in your courageous thinking and courageous action,” and the exemplarity that such thought and action might engender in the subversive memories that follow. The exhaustion of emancipatory ideals and struggles that would make nihilism victorious, and perhaps even true, can become “ubiquitous only when you reach the point in which everybody chooses to be cowardly, everybody chooses to be complacent, everybody chooses to be conformist.”100 The subversive memory of a past where such exhaustion did not come to pass stands as a perpetual rejoinder to this threat, making our historical imaginings and the genre of their articulation pressing questions of vice and virtue, hope and despair.