22. Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will Antifascist Dad Podcast — Episode 22 Hello, everybody. My name is Matthew Remski. This is the Antifascist Dad Podcast, Episode 22: Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will. For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. If you follow me on socials, you'll get short-form antifascist analysis and commentary every day. Recently I've been analyzing the bafflegab of our Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and extending the argument I started back on Episode 16 — that Carney is not your antifascist dad. Specifically, I've been looking at Carney as a case study for how liberal politicians not only fail to stand up to fascists, but can often enable them, as we're seeing now with Carney's early support for the illegal war on Iran. My gut feeling is that guys like Carney are far more dangerous to antifascism than the fascists themselves, who are always living on borrowed time. They are going to implode. But as long-term managers of the capital order, the liberals protect the conditions that produce fascism. So over on socials I'm doing some deconstruction work on how someone like Carney does this with his very elegant rhetoric. The Patreon for this show is Antifascist Dad Podcast, and subscribers get early access to every Part 2 of the main feed episodes, including this one. I'll also remind you that my book is coming out April 26th — Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. Pre-ordering apparently makes a real difference, so please consider doing that. No guests this week, just two shortish audio essays. Today I'm exploring a profound Marxist axiom usually attributed to Antonio Gramsci — but there's a story behind that. And up on Patreon right now I've got Part 2, which is a reflection on a core theme in the work of the recently departed Michael Parenti: his insistence, throughout his life, that fascism was a rational system. This has stretched my brain in helpful ways, and I think it offers an added layer of clarity for any conversation you might have with a younger person about all this stuff. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. You may have heard this before. I think it captures something deep about what we all have to do — how hard it is, how much it costs, but also how natural it is, how inevitable. I can't recall exactly when I first heard this axiom. I have a vague recollection that it was tossed out as a phrase everyone should be familiar with, during one of those classic, endless discussions with fellow leftists about the perpetual dire straits we always seem to be in. It's the kind of saying that allows a despairing conversation to end on an up note. It waves away some of the melancholy, but it's quite deep as well. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. The feeling of it reminds me of my late mother, who, with a few more turns of the screw, could have been a revolutionary herself. She always had a stern and penetrating intuition about wealthy people, about men in power — definitely a pessimist. But in her daily, instinctual actions, as an artist and craftsperson, she had a kind of boundless enthusiasm, always looking for the next beautiful thing to learn about or create. And in the end, the optimism might have won out: she worked hard toward being able to receive the most aggressive forms of therapy for advanced leukemia. She really wanted to continue making things. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Every key teacher I've had in my life has walked this line, when I think about it. Like my writing teacher, Luciano — he's also passed away — who suffered from depression and a gambling problem that could bring him down to a pretty low spot. He had an extremely pessimistic outlook toward institutions, religions, governments, and capitalists. But he had the opposite disposition toward his friends, toward his community, and toward his art. He never let a day go by without writing poetry or painting something. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I think I picked up aspects of this from my studies of Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition, which I was learning about and trying to practice many years ago. The starting point for developing enough resilience to meditate was called the path of renunciation. This is where you contemplated, in depth and at length, just how helpless you are as an organism — a material being struggling for sustenance and vulnerable to sickness, old age, separation from those you love, and death. I was taught to do this contemplation while walking around — a visualization. I was supposed to peer through the flesh of people, to see them as walking skeletons. The idea was that existential honesty, practiced over and over again — knowing that life is short and fragile, that we are walking death — forces a person to renounce, or turn away from, the despair they cannot change, and toward love and compassion. There's a paradoxical archetype at the heart of this Buddhist idea: the Bodhisattva, who is a highly evolved, not-quite-Buddha person who commits to working endlessly, life after life, to lead people toward enlightenment. But the problem is there are infinite beings in suffering. So you know this with the intellect, but you rally your will to help them nonetheless. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This also echoed when I came across the feminist philosophy of Eve Sedgwick, who described the habit that Marxists and leftists can have of paranoid reading — that's what she called it — this hypervigilant feeling when encountering media, of always looking for the problem, the structural flaw, always looking for the exploiter, the outsourced cost, the villain. In psychology, it's a position Freud occupied as well, because he was always pointing at the assumption that things are never as they seem, that we are propelled by dark urges we're barely aware of. And in many ways this is a necessary position for any kind of learning, especially within capitalism, because capitalism hides its logic just as well as the ego hides its drives. One of Sedgwick's most moving observations is that we may adopt paranoid reading strategies in order to avoid humiliation — so that when things turn out as badly as they usually do, at least we won't be surprised. But what Sedgwick says is that the habit of paranoid reading, or pessimism of the intellect, can foreclose on the energy of reparative reading: the act of actively finding the gold in the world and in each other. Paranoid reading can be a claustrophobic feedback loop. I think reparative reading takes optimism of the will. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This has taken on new meaning as I've grown up as a parent in this age of fascism, because every day is marked by the gap between what you know and what you can share — between your accumulated disappointments and the knowledge that your world is not the child's world, which must remain for them an open road. Obviously, transparency and honesty are crucial for kids, but must be apportioned over time. And while you hold your pessimism of the intellect so they can exercise their optimism of the will, it will eat you up if you're anything like me. Sometimes I wonder whether these two values are transitive between parent and child over time. As the adult's pessimism of the intellect slowly migrates to the child during the course of basic instruction about the world, maybe there's a reverse transfer going in the other direction. Maybe if they gradually have to hold an increase in pessimism of the intellect, this displaces some of their optimism into you — so that whenever you say goodbye that last time, you share an equal balance of pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. So where does the axiom come from? Like many people, I came to think that Antonio Gramsci was the origin point. It is referenced in the weekly communist paper Gramsci helped publish in Turin, called L'Ordine Nuovo — around 1919, 1920. And he references it again in the Prison Notebooks, which are a little later. There was something about the inclusion of this concept in the Prison Notebooks that was so poignant to me. Gramsci was a communist with a seat in the Italian parliament when he was arrested in 1926, after Mussolini's emergency laws abolished opposition protections. In 1928, the fascists sentenced him to more than twenty years in prison. The prosecution famously declared that the regime must stop "this brain" — Gramsci's brain — from functioning. That's a pretty high compliment. Gramsci had lifelong physical disabilities, including tuberculosis of the spine. In the squalid Turin prison, all of his conditions were exacerbated by illness, malnutrition, and isolation. He was given nothing to read at first, and then, after asking for writing materials for two years, he finally got them. And he wrote the Prison Notebooks, which are famous for innovating the idea of cultural hegemony — how ruling classes maintain power not only through force, but by shaping culture, norms, and common sense so that their dominance appears natural and legitimate. This happens through institutions like schools, the media, and religion, which all reproduce consent and make political change require long-term cultural struggle within civil society. That long-term aspect is key, because from prison, Gramsci is able to fully regard the beginning of this past century of losses. The defeat of the Turin factory labour councils in 1919 and 1920 kicked it all off. He watches that happen. He watches the failures of revolutionary movements in places like Germany and the consolidation of fascism in Italy. And he knows that the century is going to be very long. The fascists actually released Gramsci in 1934, but his health never recovered. He died in 1937, with his prison writings going on to reshape Marxist theory. His pessimism of the intellect meant ruthless analysis of social forces, deep recognition of the resilience of capitalists, and a refusal to indulge mythic or utopian thinking. But his optimism of the will was about committing to organization, long-term cultural work, intellectual discipline, strategic patience, and faith in a kind of collective power despite adverse conditions. So Gramsci is a great personal representative for pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. But actually, the mantra goes back a bit further. In 1919, as he recovered from the trauma of the French trenches, French writer Raymond Lefebvre published a novel that spoke to his wartime radicalization. It was called Le Sacrifice d'Abraham. The book contemplated the moral devastation of the war generation and the sacrifice of youth by bourgeois society. Abraham leads Isaac to the trenches in Flanders Fields — that's the theme. And in 1920, the critic Romain Rolland reviewed the novel in the periodical L'Humanité: "What I especially love in Lefebvre is this intimate alliance which for me makes the true man — of pessimism of the intelligence which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will." So that's the root. I include it to show just how much this saying calls out from Flanders Fields and the stark recognition — especially among the communists — that the Great War was a slaughterhouse of the working class, as senseless as God's command to Abraham that he sacrifice his son. Now, maybe it's because I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen's song about it on an endless loop. The image of Isaac tripping along up the mountain path behind his clearly possessed father, having no clue what the deal is, what's going to happen — and then eventually realizing he's being led to his own sacrifice. This has always haunted me. There is no English translation of Lefebvre's novel, so I don't know exactly how he treats the theme. But I imagine he's implying that the youth of Europe were led up the mountain with promises of noble glory — led by a paternal archetype, the monarch, the general, the bishop. Nobody told them where they were going. I don't know the exact passage or themes Rolland was praising, but I imagine the focus is on how Isaac survived — and how, as a survivor, he saw his father and the whole authority structure that held him up more clearly. Intergenerational trauma is a deep well for pessimism of the intellect. But the fact that Isaac survived might symbolize optimism of the will. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Gramsci is meditating on having clarity about the brutality of capitalism and fascism, while knowing that it must destroy itself — with the help of the conscience of common people. So I've given some context, a little history, some examples of how this axiom has landed for me in my own experience. But I feel it may still be a little abstract — and it often is for me too. Sometimes, for me, it becomes felt when I can map it onto my body and my moment-by-moment experience. Like: where is my intellect, and what does it feel like? How is it different from my will? You may have different answers, but here's my experience. My intellect floats upward in my body. It moves quickly. It works incessantly in space. It creates a shadow above me, sometimes a thought bubble full of static. It can maintain a strong interpretive framework, but it's repeatedly exhausted and despondent when I truly grasp the seeming impossibility of real change. So I have a mode in which the upper part of my body is perpetually scrolling and the lower part is distant, or even numb. Sometimes that's preferable, because I don't want to really feel things. The value of that intellectual space — in and above my body — is that I can never forget the contradictions that make capitalism ultimately impossible. And I can continue to help with the shared work of describing and theorizing the problem. But it's not always a space of ready action. But there is another space in my body, generally lower down, always responding to material needs automatically, usually with unconscious generosity. It really is a space of ready action. And no matter how much topside spinning there is, that animal body continues to breathe. It's indomitable. When the child with disabilities in our home needs help, I must move. I just have to move. When a friend is in need, the intellect retreats into the background. Maybe one way of thinking of depression is the state in which that upper part can never retreat — and so the lower part feels dead. In antifascism, we often talk about the need for both theory and mutual aid. And I think Gramsci's axiom makes these palpable — not as two different tasks that we somehow have to micromanage to make sure they get equal attention, but as two characteristics of bodily experience. And this is part of why internal complaints on the left about who isn't doing enough mutual aid at any given time can be myopic. I am pretty sure that everyone in the world with a heart is taking care of as much business as they can. And that in itself is an optimistic thought. So that's what I try to do with Gramsci: feel the sober clarity of analysis, supported by the living impulse that drives me to materially help others — and even myself. That's it for today. If you're on Patreon, there's another short essay available now on Michael Parenti's insistence on the rationality of fascism, even as the spectacle of irrationality plays out in front of our eyes. You can catch that there now, or wait until it unlocks here. All right, you pessimists of the intellect, you optimists of the will — keep safe, and take care of yourselves and each other until next week.