Thread by @ironick

Thanks SO much for recommending this essay. It triggered a powerful epiphany for me: 'tragic meliorism' is another way of saying 'will to power'. This passage makes the connection:
«As I understand the pragmatic perspective on life, it is an attempt to make it possible for men

https://twitter.com/Adrian_Rutt/status/1410902022077964288

to live in a world of inescapable tragedy, which flows from the conflict of moral ideals, without lamentation, defiance, or make-believe. According to this perspective, even in the best of human worlds there will be tragedy—tragedy perhaps without bloodshed but certainly not

without tears. It focuses its analysis on problems of normative social inquiry in order to reduce the costs of tragedy. Its view of man is therefore melioristic, not optimistic. Some philosophers belittle man by asking him to look at the immensities without; others belittle him

by asking him to look at the perversities and selfishness within. Pragmatism denies nothing about the world or man which one truly finds in them, but it sees in men something which is at once, to use the Sophoclean phrase, more wonderful and more terrible than anything else in

the universe—the power to make themselves and the world around them better or worse. In this way pragmatic meliorism avoids the romantic pessimism of Russell’s free man, shaking his fist in defiance of a malignant universe, and the grandiose optimism of Niebuhr’s redeemed man

with his delusions of a cosmic purpose which he knows is there but knows in a way in which neither he nor anyone else can possibly understand.»

Hook's claim that pragmatism "sees in men…the power to make themselves and the world around them better or worse" is exactly what

Nietzsche was describing in "the will to power". Note that to those who believe in opposing goods and rights, the pragmatist's meliorism will appear as a naked will to power, and vice versa. That the inherent tragic dimension of the will to power: it can be redescribed as

meliorism or oppression.

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