Food for thought – Active Despair

An idea, a book, a concept, a “food for thought” that we share with you to open reflection, discover new subjects, and bring you to (re)think from another angle.

We know the terrible joke of the American filmmaker Billy Wilder, author of the funniest comedies of the 1960s whom Nazism forced to emigrate to the United States: “Pessimists end up in Beverly Hills, optimists in Auschwitz.”

Climate disaster, sixth mass extinction of species, obsolescence of man replaced by intelligent machines, return of war as the only political horizon, rise of nationalism and totalitarianism, universal expansion of the domain of corruption, explosion of global consumption of drugs of all kinds: we have left the era of risks to enter that of existential threats. It is too late to continue to deceive ourselves and criminal to maintain false hopes. From now on, it is less about choosing between optimism and pessimism than finding the right and useful way to despair, the most effective, rational, and creative despair.
“The most important moral task today is to make men understand that they must worry and that they must openly proclaim their legitimate fear. Most people are not able to produce by themselves this fear that it is necessary to have today. We must therefore help them,” noted the German philosopher Günther Anders in the 1980s in an interview entitled And if I am desperate, what do you want me to do about it? published in the collective book The Destruction of the Future. Which can be translated into this commandment: Worry your neighbor as yourself! At Anders’ time, the nuclear catastrophe was still the only figure of catastrophe. Today we know all its metamorphoses and countless avatars. Worrying your neighbor and worrying yourself is therefore simply common sense.
There are two forms of worry, one motivating, the other paralyzing, one of life, the other of death. The first sees the worst in reality, the second sees the reality of the worst. One generates the active form of despair, the other is its nihilistic poison. The first announces the catastrophe to make its analysis a weapon of mass deterrence, the second prophesies ruin and misfortune.

“Despair is man’s attack on himself, a moral suicide,” noted Sartre in La mort dans l’âme, the last volume of the trilogy The Roads to Freedom, which recounts the defeatism of France in 1940. A trilogy, moreover, very enlightening on the ambient declinism of our era and the reactionary political myths of rebirth and reconquest attached to it, and a very useful breviary to help today’s entrepreneurs and managers keep a course in the fog that thickens more and more each day.
Active despair – which one can also call enlightened – is that which does not submit, which refuses resignation and resists fatality. It is the ultimate stage of lucidity, a lucidity that has gone through despair instead of simply measuring situations and perspectives from the height of its clairvoyance, without taking the risk of despair, without plunging into the night. It knows that catastrophe is imminent, that it may even have already occurred but that it remains indeterminate, thus always leaving a margin of action to men. It reminds us that, even if things are desperate, one must still want to change them. Relieved of anxiety and panic, it is a despair that becomes almost peaceful and wise, a despair as a new intellectual requirement and a new form of ethical health. A despair without anger or vengeance that seeks no form of consolation. No God nor Messiah nor apocalypse nor providential technology to save us or console us.

Active despair requires demonstrating sufficient serenity to accept not changing things one cannot change, sufficient courage to change those we can change, and sufficient wisdom to correctly distinguish between the two. In this, it is stoic. It fiercely opposes nihilism, which is the will to despair, the will of the end of will, the programming of despair as the only rational outcome. And it unmasks the irrational or ideological foundation of collapsology.
Since we opened with Billy Wilder, let us provisionally conclude with Woody Allen: “I would like to end with a message of hope but I don’t have one. Instead, would two messages of despair do?”

References
Catherine Larrère / Essay on Catastrophic Blindness
Günther Anders / And if I am desperate, what do you want me to do about it?
For an Enlightened Catastrophism / Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Meditations / Marcus Aurelius
The Rebel / Camus
La mort dans l’âme / Sartre
Treatise on Despair / Kierkegaard
On the Heights of Despair / Cioran
A summary note by Paul-Henri Moinet