Recently I talked with someone about something and was asked whether I’m optimistic, and I answered something to the effect of “Not to make a self-refuting prophecy, but I think things will work out well at the end. We just have to make turn out that way and not get complacent”. So I was both descriptively optimistic and prescriptively optimistic, though my descriptive optimism was conditional on other people being prescriptively optimistic and doing what needs to be done. Perhaps you can call that conditional optimism—I’m optimistic about X conditional on Y. Though that raises the question of whether you’re optimistic about Y.
P.S: In the part where you quote Romain Rolland it’s not clear that you’re quoting him and not Gramsci (I had to enter the link to find out), could be made clearer if you put the Gramsci part in parentheses.
I like this distinction.
Recently I talked with someone about something and was asked whether I’m optimistic, and I answered something to the effect of “Not to make a self-refuting prophecy, but I think things will work out well at the end. We just have to make turn out that way and not get complacent”. So I was both descriptively optimistic and prescriptively optimistic, though my descriptive optimism was conditional on other people being prescriptively optimistic and doing what needs to be done. Perhaps you can call that conditional optimism—I’m optimistic about X conditional on Y. Though that raises the question of whether you’re optimistic about Y.
P.S: In the part where you quote Romain Rolland it’s not clear that you’re quoting him and not Gramsci (I had to enter the link to find out), could be made clearer if you put the Gramsci part in parentheses.