Leon Trotsky: On pessimism, optimism, the 20th century and much more [“Vostochnoye Obosreniye" (Eastern Review) No 36, February 17, 1901, under the pseudonym Antid Oto, my own translation from Л. Троцкий. Проблемы культуры. Культура старого мира. (Л. Троцкий. Сочинения. Том 20. Москва-Ленинград, 1926. Corrections and improvements to my translation by English native speakters would be EXTREMELY welcome] Dum spiro, spero! (As long as I breathe, I hope!) If I were a real, patented scientist and if I decided to write a monograph on pessimism and optimism, I would, of course, start with the classification. This gives the work the necessary solidity, often making up for the lack of content … But since I'm not a scientist, only an "outsider" and I do not write monographs, but "letters", then … And yet, I'll start with the classification: what self-abasement indeed! … This classification, which I will allow myself to offer to you, is based on the distribution of optimism and pessimism in relation to the elements of the sacramental triad – Past, Present, Future. And optimism and pessimism, despite their logical opposition, psychologically almost always exist in the same person, direction, class: while optimism is directed to one element of the trinity, pessimism is directed to the other. Here several combinations are possible, several basic types have a deep social meaning. Let us deal with them, and, first of all, with the type of the optimist of the past. With an expression of anger, hatred and bitterness, he observes how, "like a broken cloak, a wave of low lusts floods streets and squares", as "the most shameless desecrations dishonour his shrine" … He tries to burst out into satanic laughter when "he hears in the meeting the noise of the servants of the great beast – the mob " – in vain! His laughter sounds painful and uncertain … Then, full of sorrow, he turns his gaze with affectionate love to the past, in which he admires the soft outlines of the "quiet joys of serf life." This is the most miserable type of a bourgeois ideology. His representative is Taine1. Its symbol is a toothless skull with gaping eyes cavities. The peremptory court of history sentenced him to deprivation of all rights to the future … The second type, the optimist of the present, does not often look into the past and does not think too much about the future: he, with all his dreams and hopes, desires and fears, does not go beyond the limits of modernity. He is the embodiment of bourgeois complacency, philistine dullness and narrow-mindedness. It was he who, with the mouth of Dr. Pangloss2, claimed that our world is the best of all worlds. It was he who in the German Reichstag a quarter of a century ago laughed with a fat laughter, throwing back his dull head and waving an obese belly, when a lonely "dreamer" of a member of Parliament scourged this best of the worlds with a stern word … Finally, the third type, which we recommend to the intensified attention of the reader, is not connected with the past either by antipathies or sympathies: the past interests him only insofar as it produced the present, and the present in so far as it gives points of application to the forces that create the future. And the future – oh! it completely possesses his sympathies, his hopes, his thoughts … This third type can be described as a pessimist of the present and an optimist of the future. These are the three main types. Next to them, for the sake of completeness, it is necessary to put the absolute* optimist and the absolute pessimist. The first usually connects optimism with mysticism: there is nothing more convenient than, having dumped responsibility for the progress of earthly affairs to supranatural forces, relying entirely on their benevolence and, folding one's arms over one's chests, to reflect on the topic that "not we began the world, not we will end it"… This category includes the late Vl. Solovyov 3. The absolute pessimist is the spirit of denial, the spirit of doubt, the product of difficult historical moments, when the future is unclear, and the present is "empty or dark" when social disharmonies reach higher tension … This pessimism can create a philosopher, a lyrical poet (Schopenhauer4 , Leopardi5), but will not create a civic fighter. Les extrêmes se touchent (the extremes converge). The last two types, seemingly representing the absolute opposite of one another, converge at one very important point: they are both passive. Not so the optimist of the future. He is the activity itself. His pessimism and his optimism do not amount to "zwei Seelen in einer Brust", two souls fighting between themselves and making him the prey of reflection (Faust, Hamlet). No, they are united in it in harmonic wholeness: the optimism of the future only then serves as an imperative to highly idealistic civic activity, when its roots are fed by the pessimism of the present … … Reality not only laughed at the optimist of the future with a fat laughter, but also put him to tremendous tests. This he exclaimed at the interrogation of the Holy Inquisition, full of faith in the triumph of truth,: E pur si muove! (And yet it moves!) He was "meekly and without shedding of blood" burned on February 17, 1600 in Rome, at Campofiore**, and he, like a phoenix, reborn from the ashes and, still passionate, believing and struggling. With a confident hand he knocked at the gates of history. He won the right to reveal the laws governing the movement of the celestial bodies, but when he tore his inquisitive gaze from outer space and transferred it to the earth, to this "pathetic little clod of dirt", and began to search for laws governing the movement of human societies – the collective Torquemada6 more than once paid him special attention. E pur si muove! he still answered Torquemada, a believer and actor, actor and believer … On the one hand, the optimist of the future is opposed by the philistine. Strong by his mass and untouched by his vulgarity, fully armed with experience, which does not go beyond the counter, chancery table and a double bed, he shakes his head sceptically and condemns the "idealist dreamer" with a pseudo-realistic statement: "There is nothing new under the moon, the world is an eternal repetition of the past "… On the other hand, against the same optimist rises the graduated priest of science, who achieved the most grandiose conquests in the nineteenth century. “Profane!” the priest turns to the "dreamer". "If we assume an age of 100 million years for organic life on earth – and this is the minimum permitted by science – then the tenth part of a million is allotted to the human race, and the proportion of what you call with such brilliance in your eyes “world history”, accounts for the miserable clout of time of six millennia. Or, in order to imprint these relations in your uninitiated mind, not accustomed to operating over such colossal periods, I will translate them into the language of the most familiar periods of time. If you set organic life at 24 hours, then for the human species it will take – 2 minutes, and for all your "world history" – no more, no less than 5 seconds … That is what you mourn for, that is what you suffer for, that is what you pray for, that is what you fight for, when the whole period of historical life is nothing more than a second of eternity, an insignificant episode of cosmic evolution, a transient combination of mechanical forces, a fleeting convulsion of world matter! Submit, dreamer, to the immensity of infinity and the infinity of eternity!” “Dum spiro, spero! As long as I breathe, I hope!” exclaims the optimist of the future. "If I were to live the life of celestial bodies, I would be completely indifferent to the pathetic lump of dirt lost in the boundlessness of the universe, I would shine both wicked and good alike … But I'm a human! And the "world history", which for you, the sober priest of science, the accountant of eternity, seems like a helpless second in the balance of time, is everything to me! And as long as I breathe, I will fight for the future, that bright and shining future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will master the spontaneous course of his history and direct it towards boundless horizons of beauty, joy, happiness! .. Dum spiro, spero! To the miserable philistine with his denial of changes in the sub-lunar world, the optimist of the future confronts the same accounting calculations of science. “Look!” – he exclaims: – “out of 5 seconds of world history, less than half a second is released for all your petty-bourgeois existence – and, perhaps, less than a tenth of a second remains until the end of your historical existence. Long live the future!” People passed through the series of centuries, indifferent to the movement of the earth around the sun, and only dramatic episodes of the continuous struggle for the future gave a bright colour to these naked arithmetical conventions, these giants of calendrical origin. The nineteenth century, which in many ways satisfied the expectations of the optimist of the future, and even more so betrayed them, compelled him to postpone the main part of his hopes to the twentieth century. When he encountered some outrageous fact, he would exclaim: How? On the eve of the twentieth century! … When he developed marvellous pictures of a harmonious future, he put them into the twentieth century … And now – this twentieth century has come! What did it meet at its doorstep? In France – a poisonous foam of racial hatred; in Austria – the nationalistic bickering of bourgeois chauvinists; in the south of Africa – the agony of a small nation, receiving the coup de grace from a colossus; on the "free" island – triumphant hymns in honour of the victorious greed of the jingo stock brokers; dramatic "complications" in the East; rebellious movements of the starving masses – in Italy, Bulgaria, Romania7 … Hatred and murder, hunger and blood … It seems that the new century, this gigantic unknown, at the very moment of its appearance, is in a hurry to sentence the optimist of the future to absolute pessimism, to civic nirvana. "Death to utopias! Death to the faith! Death of love! Death to hope!” – rattles the twentieth century with rifle volleys and rumblings of cannon. - Submit, pathetic dreamer! Here I am, your long-awaited twentieth century, your "future"! … - “No!” – answers the rebellious optimist: – “you are only the present!” 1 Taine, Hippolyte – French historian, philosopher and critic. This characteristic of Taine, as an "optimist of the past", refers to the views he expressed in his famous book The Origin of Contemporary France. In the second part of this book, The Revolution, Taine shows extreme hostility to all the main aspects of the French Revolution. In Jacobinism, in particular, he sees the cause of all the calamities of revolutionary France. He depicts revolutionary power as a new despotism, and the movement of the masses as chaos and anarchy of the mob. 2Hero of Voltaire's novel “Candide or Optimism” * "Absoluteness" should be understood here not in the philosophical, but in the colloquially-everyday sense, because the absolute (whether optimism, pessimism), in the philosophical sense of the word, no person is allowed to contain. 3 Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeevich (1858-1900) – a well-known philosopher, publicist and poet, who connected the church-mystical world view with liberal views on political and social issues. Solovyov's philosophy had great success in the mystical circles of the Russian pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. 4 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860) – the famous German pessimist philosopher. The basic position of Schopenhauer is that the source and essence of all existence is the senseless thirst for life (the "will to live"), whose inner emptiness condemns to eternal suffering. In the history of humankind there is no plan, no unity, no progress; in personal life, every pleasure is deceptive; the monotonous alternation of suffering and boredom is the inevitable lot of man. The only way out of this is the rejection of the will to live and immersion in the blissful silence of non-existence. Preparatory steps to this state are philosophical knowledge and, in particular, aesthetic contemplation, finally it is achieved by ascetic mortification of the flesh. Schopenhauer's philosophy developed during the years of severe political and social reaction in Germany, which explains its desolate pessimism. The cult of art, as a purely ideal sphere, found a brilliant literary expression in the books of Schopenhauer, characterizing all the major cultural trends of Germany at the beginning of the 19th century. They are imbued with the idealistic philosophy of that time, Schiller's artistic idealism, Goethe's classicism, and German romantic poetry. 5 Leopardi. – The mood of the world's grief, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century gripped all European literature, found one of its most vivid spokespeople in Italy in the person of the lyrical poet Giacomo Leopardi (1793-1837). The main motive of his poetry is desperate pessimism, in the formulation of which Leopardi is very close to Schopenhauer. The theoretical basis for pessimism is given in the prose work Dialoghi (Dialogues and Thoughts, Russian translation by N. Sokolov, 1908). ** Today 301 years ago this act of cruelty took place – the burning of Giordano Bruno. 6 Torquemada (1420-1498) – Dominican monk, the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain, promoted the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain, reorganized and expanded the activities of the Inquisition and displayed monstrous cruelty and fanaticism in the persecution of heretics. 7 Here are listed the most important political events of the early 20th century, including the Dreyfus case and the Anglo-Boer War, which ended in the defeat of the Boers and the strengthening of Britain's imperialist policy. |
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