In the face of existential angst and the confounding sense of a world undone, it would seem right to hold onto hope. After all, it is said that time heals all wounds. And if the steady march of history is anything to go by, it seems equally true to say, as did Martin Luther King once: ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ But then, of course, this hardly agrees with one’s experience of the world today, shot through as it is with multiple ongoing crises. For those of us who face the material realities of a time where fascism is on the rise, economies are a wreck, and where lives are brokered daily for political gain, it can feel as though we are shuttling towards the end of the world. Even worse, things we thought we had left behind have crept up on us. And the strides we thought we had made in the way of global peace and hard-won rights turn out to have left us in the order of where we began. All this to say, perhaps 1929, 1933, and 1939 are not so far off from now that we should banish them in our minds to some bygone era – one that we have long since passed, and to which we will never return. To pat ourselves on the back is to miss the point, which is that we are as we have ever been – at risk and doomed to suffer the fate of an imperfect world.
But what, then, is left of politics? How are we to theorise and act within it? In what follows, I run through the gamut of options before landing on pessimism, which offers itself as a philosophical orientation to life and its many defects, helping us appraise politics therewith. To make my case, I draw on a range of works—from Nietzsche and Rousseau to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as well as Afro-pessimist thought. These tell us what it is to countenance the fact of things going awry – that is, to affirm life as such – and to still be in search of something more, leaving us open to surpass the tragic givenness of the world and seek what is yet possible. To be sure, this is not a false promise of melioration, nor a theoretical escape hatch out of our crisis-riven state, but it is a way for us to mark our agentic capacities and positively valuate life as it is acted through. This may look simple but I argue that the appearance of simplicity is deceptive. For the rival ways of coping with a world out of joint are honeyed with the ease of their uptake, which belies their leading nowhere at all or to an only deeper political rut.
One such “rival way” is to double down on hope, or what I call the affective mode of optimism. In Futures Past, Reinhardt Koselleck locates its source in the ‘epochal doctrine’ of Neuzeit (or, “modernity”). This emerged out of the late eighteenth century, where mass political and techno-industrial upheavals made it such that progress had ‘become… the experience of the everyday.’ What had before taken centuries to unfold was now being achieved in the span of a few years. Hence, the future was increasingly seen as non-inferable from the past, though one could expect the not-yet to be at least better than what had gone before. And so, the path was laid for a progressivist view of history, whose veritable precis one finds in the figure of Hegel.
But as I gestured to earlier, the Hegelian optimist deploys a political grammar that is out of step with how we know the present age to be. Indeed, if freedom really were on its way to being realised everywhere, why, then, is it so often violated in its own name? This is not merely to ask: ‘whose freedom?’, as if its expansion could be made in principle to cover all, even the yet unreached. The fact is, “freedom” as a political category is itself so fraught, so bound up in the abject violence done toward its Others, as to have its own normativity thrown into question. Moreover, it is just this anticipatory willing of brighter days to come that blinds us to the gaping faults and untruths of liberal capitalism – facts so basic we really ought to pay them greater heed, instead of being duped into grasping at straws: all would be fine if only we could one day, somehow get this right. Thus, looking ahead at some future telos in hopes that it will make sense of, and in turn steel us to, the troubles of the day, is a barren task – one that, as Schopenhauer would say, fails to get at the metaphysical ground of Being.
To know the core reality of politics, as of life more generally, one must adopt the “rival way” of passive nihilism – or so the argument goes. On this view, the inner essence of all worldly phenomena is nothing but endless autophagic decay. For Schopenhauer, this manifests itself in all that mars and mocks against the human condition: firstly, the ‘risk and perfidy’ that go along with our ‘struggle for survival’; secondly, the burden of time that causes all things to turn to dust; and lastly, the ‘fear of death that shadows [our] every thought’, from whose mortal coil we cannot shuffle ourselves free. To that end, not only does politics, pace Hegel, lack a satisfying upward arc, but it also resists our best efforts to save it from itself. For even as we clamber out of cavern darkness into the light of pure understanding, the knowledge so obtained does little to edify the ‘inescapably martial’ character of our political goings-about. We are left, in the vein of Hobbes, in a war of all against all, with every past tragedy apt to repeat itself as farce, every act to issue in nothing. For this reason, Schopenhauer urges an ascetic closing in on oneself to repel the lamentable facts of existence – among other things, this includes the rooting out of any desire to see the world changed.
Yet, if Schopenhauer is right about this ethic of self-negation, the field of politics must be fled. Likewise, the present is to be seen as anagnorisis – a halting in narrative closure with no sense of futurity to behold. For Eve Sedgwick, this portends the tropism of “paranoid reading”, which rules in advance that ‘Anything you can do (to me) I can do worse… and first – to myself’, that ‘no horror shall ever come to me as new.’ However, to seek comfort in the knowing all-too-well is also to engross oneself in a state of ‘terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful part-objects that one defensively projects into and ingests from the world.’ Doing so no doubt forestalls pain, but it comes at the cost of refusing to seek love, pleasure, and the repair of that same world for which one initially wept. So, while passive nihilism asserts a truer postulate of reality than optimism does, it weds itself to a fatal cynicism that sees no good in working with what we have and salvaging what we can. For there is still a point in trying to eke out a just and habitable politics, even if every last ship – social, juridical, or otherwise – has sailed.
Indeed, this is precisely the point of pessimism, to which I now turn, drawing first from Nietzsche and Rousseau. Both, I argue, share an outlook that commences in the same tragic register as that of the passive nihilist. As Joshua Dienstag puts, to be a pessimist means to go through life with ‘an expectation of… nothing’ so as to descale all of one’s grand ambitions, for ‘the desire wholly to remake the world in one’s image must be set aside once it is realised that the world will hold no image at all for very long.’ In Rousseau’s The Social Contract, this is because ‘the body politic, no less than the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born.’ As for Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, a different sort of declension is readily apparent in his portrait of man, whose mendacity causes him to use language as a mask for power, ossifying “truth” for his socially figured needs, thus becoming ‘hard-boiled, cold, and tough’ over time. And yet, this has always been the gamble of our evolving into creatures of reason, just as for Oedipus, the cost of knowledge was to have disclosed the ugliness of his own being. Likewise, for Rousseau, the myth of progress is striated with irony: what is gained in terms of civic freedom by our leaving the State of Nature is weighed against the growth of amour propre (or, “vanity”) and its moral ambiguity.
Still, against all odds, the two pessimists argue for an assent to life and a surging into it with ongoing openness. As part of his overall normative project in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wants us, who are weary of life, not to downplay the suffering we bear, but rather to take it in and laugh at its absurdity. This, I think, is part of what it is to be affected by seeing life as tragedy, in which one regards not just the struggle, agony, and insatiable lust of Being, but also Being’s delight in guilelessly playing with itself. In other words, comedy is the secret twin of tragedy. Only by cognizing this flipside are we then able to engage positively with life. Nietzsche proposes that we do this by way of questing for the fearful and questionable – or ‘that which is so threatening to our sense of order that we have heretofore denied their very being.’ The logic behind this is simple: if all the world is pure flux, so, too, can we ourselves lean into such indeterminacy. This entails a slow – albeit imaginative – labour of straining against pregiven (social) ontologies, to try and see what else could be. ‘What, however, do most people do?’ Nietzsche asks, ‘They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole.’ And if the “whole” is rejected outright as a prognosis of a life no longer worth living, such people give up their place at the frontier of radical self-making. That is why, in Dienstag’s analysis of Rousseau, the task of politics must be taken up with a view to ‘what is within our power – not to secure freedom but to experience it, however temporarily.’ This we ought to take for something good.
I now wish to conclude by reference to a couple other instantiations of a distinctly political pessimism. In Cormarc McCarthy’s The Road, a father and his son trudge along a cauterised post-apocalyptic landscape, hoping to reach the south coast of America. What is striking about the novel is its persistently bleak view of humankind. McCarthy’s descriptions of setting: ‘barren, silent, godless’, strip the characters’ journey of all legibility and support. The characters are also routinely met with the worst parts of humanity: a roving group of cannibals, an underground slave-bunker, etc. Even the father struggles to uphold his ethical claim of being one of ‘the good guys’ and ‘carrying the fire’ because he knows himself to fall short. At best, he can only enact a moral duty qua father to his son, but not to those nameless others who, like him, obey a mere survivalist ethic. The world they inhabit is one lashed to the amoral domain of the Aristotelian oikos (or ‘household’), in spite of which the father never eschews the possibility of going beyond it into the polis. Indeed, he repeatedly invokes the language of moral universals, which, for Aristotle, given their source in one’s deliberating with others, could only exist in the sociality of the polis. In so doing, the father embodies a questing for grace, for that glimpse of political beginning which he fears, questions, and is himself yet unable to perform.
In a similar way, Afro-pessimism, which is borne of a sobering attack on the liberal-humanist state of things, tarries in the gap between what is and ought to be. For Jared Sexton, in his interview On Black Negativity, or The Affirmation of Nothing, the social world as it stands is torn at its racialised seams: to be black in it is to be ontologised as slavish (see Fanon’s “sociogeny”) and constitutively excluded from the rights-bearing subject. There simply has not been a clean break from chattel slavery to abolition “freedom”: the latter, as I have suggested above, is a double bind, a pretext for disfiguring black lives with impunity; while the former, traceable in Orlando Patterson’s social death, cries out from under its cover. It is tempting, then, to satirise the Afro-pessimist as ‘flattening black[ness]’ into an incorrigible whole, as looking for ‘injury and rupture’ in everything. Of course, the Afro-pessimist does believe that unless a root-and-branch overhaul of the system is at hand, this “tearing of the world” will not go away. But the Afro-pessimist is no passive nihilist either: theirs is not a lachrymose politics of despair because, for Sexton, it is ‘not rooted in [the] hope of winning’ – no, what they long for is a ‘politics without claim whose demand is “too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds.”’ That is to say, the Afro-pessimist knows their goal to be far away. Still, a recurrent attempt is made at ‘phrasing how to think about and within that wounded vertigo that is blackness’, out of which emerges something like Sedgwick’s ‘conferral of plenitude’ upon the yet inchoate object of being free.
In times like these, I often think of Arendt in Crises of the Republic: ‘We are free to change the world and start something new in it.’