On pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will - The Social Science Collective:
In the voluminous writings he composed during his eleven years
imprisonment under the fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci repeatedly cites
the aphorism, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (which
he ascribed to the novelist Romain Rolland). In one of his letters, he
expanded the idea: “The challenge of modernity is to live without
illusions and without becoming disillusioned … I’m a pessimist because
of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” In the context of
Gramsci’s life and work, the phrase had a particular resonance. He was
suffering isolation and deprivation in prison, from which he had no hope
of release. The left, and with it, for Gramsci, the prospects for
humanity, had suffered terrible reverses. In these conditions the
aphorism was a formula for survival. It also has to be seen in relation
to the major concerns of his prison writings: the connection between
theory and practise, the role of intellectuals, the dialectic of
subjective and objective factors.
The phrase has long appealed to activists, who recognise in it
something true to their own experience and find it sustaining. It’s a
powerful warning against wishful thinking, like Amilcar Cabral’s command
to “Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”
And at the same time it’s a counsel against resignation. It proposes a
determined, open-eyed engagement with history, something we’d all aspire
to.
But presented baldly as it often is, as a complete answer to a
persistent question, I’ve found it increasingly problematic. I’m not
sure that either “will” or “intellect”, “optimism” or “pessimism”
represent the realities of our situation, or are categories that can do
the work the aphorism assigns to them.
Left activism surely calls for a relationship between “intellect” and
“will”, not their separation into opposing camps. In any case, they
never exist independently of each other and at times can infect and
distort each other. I think everyone on the left knows that an unbending
optimism of the will can corrupt or compromise intellectual clarity.
And no one should pretend that relentless pessimism of the intellect is
not debilitating.
“Optimism of the will”, as a duty, turns us into divided people. It’s
one of those impossible, unreal injunctions, like “live every day to
the fullest” or “always look at the glass half full instead of
half-empty”. It’s a recipe for denial, with all the neuroses that
accompany it. If optimism is made compulsory the danger is it becomes
compulsive. It breeds a voluntarism that is compelled to exclude
unwelcome thoughts or feelings.
Where is the logic of optimism if there are no rational grounds for
it? If there really is no chance of effecting change, then why bother
with activism? Is it self-vindicating, something pursued for its own
sake, or is it goal-orientated? We’re often reassured that “the process”
is what matters. And yet essential to that process is “keeping your
eyes on the prize”. How is that possible if you’ve decided the prize is
an illusion?
And what is “will”? It’s not passion or emotion but is clearly
grounded in them. It’s presented as a faculty of consciousness, as
consciousness imposing itself over habit or environment, as a mastery of
self and circumstances. But can “will” ever be entirely an entity of
consciousness? Its sources lie in the sub-conscious. And in reality, as
any therapist will tell you, “will power” or “mastering the self”
requires recognition of precisely that sub-conscious grounding, and
indeed of the illusions of “mastery” and “will”.
Pessimism of the intellect, as a principle, can be as distortive in
its way as wishful thinking. It is as irrational to deny possibilities,
to foreclose developments, as it is to imagine they exist where they do
not. There is of course the pessimism of the intellect of the right,
which discounts human capacities and sees capitalism as the end of
history. That is most definitely not what Gramsci was talking about. But
on the left, pessimism of the intellect sometimes takes on a
pseudo-authority, it becomes exactly what Gramsci warned against, a form
of self-protective “disillusionment”, that preserves itself and its
authority by not investing in immediate or medium term hopes.
Over the years, in the wake of defeats or disappointments, I’ve been
told by “wise men” of the left that of course it was inevitable. With
professorial condescension, they’ve informed me that given the balance
of forces, etc. it could have only worked out this way and it was naive
to think otherwise. These days I see that posture as a defence
mechanism, a way of denying pain or despair or frustration – and
sometimes a way of imposing a personal superiority by claiming to embody
objectivity and historical acuity. To make hope real, to exercise an
optimism of the will, you have to invest in it: your time, your energy,
your sense of self and your role in the world. Without that, movements
cannot move.
In light of these considerations, how does the aphorism apply to our
current situation? Looking to the future, there seem extensive grounds
for pessimism. It’s more than possible that capitalism will resolve its
current crisis at the expense of the working class and to its own
historic advantage. It will unburden itself of past compromises. Levels
of social support of all kinds will be reduced. Much of the workforce
will be casualised and outsourced. Struggles for social justice will
then have to be waged from the lower, weaker ground created by these
defeats. In Britain, the NHS will be dismantled and not reassembled by a
future Labour government.
Meanwhile, the hopes of the Arab Spring have been blighted by
imperial and sectarian violence. Climate change continues unchecked, as
recent news of the accelerating retreat of the Arctic icecap shows,
while governments nearly everywhere downgrade the issue and shrug off
responsibility. Global crises in both water and food supply are said to
be imminent, the result of the pressure of capitalist priorities.
Altogether it’s a dismal prospect. It seems all we can hope for is the
dubious pleasure of being able to say “we told you so”.
Yet none of this is cast in stone. Probabilities are never
certainties. The odds can alter with astonishing speed, depending on the
shifting conjunction of variables – among them our own actions, our
“will”.
There are other sides of the story, notably in Latin America, where
inroads have been made on neo-liberalism with significant benefits for
the poor. In Europe, levels of resistance may well rise, including here
in Britain, where we’ve only begun to feel the brunt of the cuts. As
austerity is seen to fail, more people will seek an alternative. As for
the Arab Spring, it is of course far too early to tell. The popular
aspirations that entered the political arena, that opened up that arena,
are still working themselves out, subject to intense pressures from
various directions. The democratic revolutions in Europe of 1848 were
mostly unsuccessful or rolled back or co-opted. Nonetheless, the year
did mark a leap forward, one which was the indispensable condition for
the progress that eventually did take place.
It’s only in our own time that capitalism has fulfilled the destiny
Marx ascribed to it, becoming a truly global system and subjecting an
ever-wider range of social relations to its imperatives. But at this
moment of climax it has imploded. Even as it reaches its global apogee
and maximises its penetration, capitalism stands exposed as crisis-prone
and anti-social. It no longer even offers the prospects for individual
social mobility that have won it such allegiance in the past.
The important break-through of the last few years has been the spread
of a critical view of capitalism – a system which for many years we
weren’t even allowed to name (as it masked itself behind euphemisms like
“the market” or “free enterprise”). It might be said that we have
learned to name the system, but not its alternative. As Gramsci said in
his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that
the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”
Optimism of the will, the willingness to sacrifice for a larger goal,
has been made harder by the collapse of existing alternatives, both
Communist and social democratic, as well as by the retreat of liberalism
into a capitalist ‘realism’. Utopianism in general, as a mode of
thinking, has been banished from mainstream discussion. In this
situation we need a kind of ‘optimism of the intellect’: a determined
search for the levers of change in the here and now, coupled with the
imagining of a just and sustainable society, a better human future,
which is a necessary prelude to making that future a concrete
possibility.
Our hopes lie in the unresolved nature of the present. Life is fluid
and contradictory. Any moment contains multiple possibilities, which in
turn generate further possibilities. We do not and cannot fully know the
whole that is currently evolving, and we have no right to foreclose the
future. Had that been done by the radicals of the past – abolitionists,
feminists, trades unionists, democrats – we wouldn’t even be talking
now. As Blake said, “the ratio of all we know will be different when we
know more.” Blanket injunctions either to pessimism or optimism deny the
inherently mixed, multi-stranded character of social reality.
The human faculty for cooperation, along with the unalterable facts
of human interdependency, remains a perennial source of hope (more
important I think than ‘optimism’). History attests to our capacity for
creativity and compassion as much as our capacity for destruction and
hate. The reality is that value is still created outside the mechanisms
of exchange, in relationships and in creative and cooperative acts of
all kinds. These are real – in some ways more real than the exchange
value worshipped by capitalism – and they permeate our lives and nourish
us.
I ask myself how Palestinians address the pessimism / optimism
equation. They face as grim a present and as unpromising a future as
anyone on the planet. Their long struggle for freedom is for the moment a
struggle for survival – against a ruthless opponent backed by the
world’s superpower, encumbered with a corrupt and ineffectual official
leadership, under daily political, economic and environmental attack. In
a way, Palestinians have been living with this for years. Much of
Palestinian literature is a record of a struggle against despair and
dissolution. Despite everything, they have held to their aspirations,
sustaining not just an ‘identity’ but a political project. Their
injunction is “Samoud” – steadfastness. Here the present is a moment of
duty to past and future, a link between the two. This is an approach we
can emulate, remaining “steadfast” in our opposition to the current
regime and in our vision of a better future.
In a sense, pessimism of the intellect is always in order because we
are up against titanic forces, whose powers, reach, resources dwarf our
own. The only things we can match them in are motivation, determination
and imagination. Radical politics always involves redefining the
possible, freeing it from the circumscription of received ideas. Today
that means rejecting the faux-realism which construes the imperatives of
capital as supra-human law. It means replacing capitalism’s hubristic
claim to be ‘the end of history’ with a revival of Marx’s idea that only
with its abolition will we see the beginnings of a truly human history.
Without doubt, what we do or don’t do now will shape what others are
able to do in the future. In calculating the odds of success, remember
Archimedes on the power of the lever: “Give me a place to stand on, and I
will move the Earth.”
