Scenes from a Conceptual History of Courage, Part 2

Georges Jacques Danton exclaiming, “To defeat, we need audacity, and always audacity,” August 1792. Chromolithograph, nineteenth century.

Solzhenitsyn on the Decline of Courage

In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement lecture at Harvard.1 His biography up to this point was riddled with punishments for acts of courageous truth-telling, for example during the Stalinist regime. He was even once called “the most courageous writer in the whole history of Russia” for having “fought alone against the Soviet Empire” and beaten it.2 However, his overall biography is far from being unambivalent: he converted from being a member of the Russian Orthodox Church to being a fighting atheist with Marxist-Leninist leanings, was arrested and sent to the Gulag for criticizing Stalin, was stripped of his citizenship, and ended up in the US and ultimately reconverted to the Russian Orthodox Church (and even met Putin).

His commencement lecture, at a university whose motto is “Veritas”—what an ideological fit during the Cold War—polarized his audience. Solzhenitsyn saw the truth of his contemporary present embodied in an increasing disappearance of worldly consistency. This manifested, he said, in a conjuncture where the Soviet Union pretended to be the bearer of historical justice without having an impartial juridical system, while the West pretended to have an impartial juridical system that in fact reinforced the structural inequalities of the social-economic world. His was thus an attempt to be anti-communist as well as anti-capitalist. And “the most striking feature” that characterized Solzhenitsyn’s West was the “decline in courage”: “The Western world has lost its courage … and gets tongue-tied and paralyzed when” it “deal[s] with … aggressors and international terrorists.”3 It had cut all ties between politics and truth, turning into a cowardly organization that materialized a general paralysis of political life. “Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”4 When courage decays, it’s the beginning of the end. However, Solzhenitsyn clearly insinuated that it takes courage to voice the truth of the situation and detect that a shape of life has grown old—an act of courage in the end times of courage.

Two hundred years earlier, Kant made a plea for exiting5 a courageless conjuncture, bemoaning not a “lack of understanding, but [a] lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.”6 Without such courage, there is “laziness and cowardice.” These “are the reasons why such a large proportion of men … gladly remains immature for life … If I have a … spiritual advisor to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on … I need not to think as long as I can pay.” What people have instead of courage and the use of their own understanding are “dogmas and formulas [Satzungen und Formeln], i.e. mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of their natural endowments.”7 People believe that they think, in dogmas and formulas, and due to their reliance on these, since they are also dogmas and formulas about what thinking is, they do not really think. Unthinking becomes so ingrained that “if anyone were to throw [these dogmas] off, [people] would still be uncertain in jumping over even the narrowest of trenches.”8 In such end times, the most modest leap of faith appears to be a jump over the Mariana Trench. For thinking always confronts us with trenches, Kant insinuates. 9 While Solzhenitsyn was presenting his diagnosis during a certain height of Western capitalism, Kant was reflecting on the absence of courage around the time of its implementation. Capitalism and courage, not a good fit.

Fear is a symptom of a courage-deficit and the structural incapacitation of thought. “Fear is now an environment, a surrounding, a world,” as Paul Virilio commented on capitalism’s dynamics in the twentieth century.10 Badiou has spoken of a predominant “politics of fear” that symptomatically embodies at least the Global North’s suspension of any affirmative political vision. Fear is a structurally passivizing affect that often “create[s] the desire for a master who will protect you, even if only while oppressing and impoverishing you all the more.”11 In such a situation one is determined by what one seeks to avoid—even though, as some theorists of catastrophe have argued, what societies try to avoid is often brought about by the very ways they seek to avoid it. In 2012, Virilio asked, “What can be done with collective fear?,” emphasizing that what is missing is “collective courage.” He dreamt at that point of an institution that he named “a university of disasters” where we would all engage in “a collective reflection on [present] limits.”12

Courage and Anxiety

A distinction established since at least Kierkegaard, then elaborated and complicated by Heidegger, Lacan, and others, is that between fear and anxiety. Fear always has an object and a specific temporality, the future. Anxiety, on the other hand, manifests a profound disorientation in the subjective present. In it we lose our orientation by means of objects. There is a form of absolute disoriented certainty: I cannot say what it is—which is why it subjectivizes me—but I am absolutely certain that I am anxious. Lacan will say that anxiety never deceives.13 For Heidegger, anxiety comes with a voiding of the world (everything appears nil and meaningless to me) and the loss of worldly consistency. Fear allows me to economize, anxiety does not. Fear stabilizes, anxiety makes things break down. Heidegger will insinuate that, in an anxious state, I do not feel at home in my home, because I realize that this home was never my home in the first place.14 Anxiety undoes what one took for granted and thereby brings us to the brink of our own collapse. But working with it, working with the undoing of things, can prove productive. This is why Heidegger speaks of a necessary courage to be anxious that interrupts our immersion in the spontaneous ideology of everyday life and worldly fears. For with it can commence another form of relation to the world and to practice. A courage not related to fear but to anxiety, a kind of audacious anxiety, would constitute a practice of affirmative undoing. Such a courage would not start from knowledge, ability, or capacity but rather deal with and begin from loss.15 Courage would be a matter of inducing anxiety, or delivering anxiety in the right doses. Courage would be the same as anxiety, until it is put to work.

Hegel in/on Urgent Times

How might such an inducing of anxiety operate? On October 22, 1818, Hegel gives his inaugural lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin. He indicates that there was a period in which the “urgency of times [Not der Zeit]” made philosophical thought impossible. But “a[ny] heart which is still in good health still has the courage to demand truth.”16 When the times are no longer dominated by the struggle for mere survival, the time of a form of inner life, a time of the heart, the coeur, can begin. The time of coeurage, as it were. This is the time for philosophy, since “the courage of truth, faith in the power of the spirit is the first condition of philosophical study.” Courage—a leap of faith that allows one to trust the force of thought—conditions philosophy, and the wager it makes is that the world can be thought from the immanence of truths. If there weren’t such courage, we’d live in a very different world. As Hegel states, “However man looks at the world, the world looks back at him.”

For “everyone has the desire”—let me underline: everyone!—to encounter “the eternal… within the temporal.”17 To identify the eternal in the temporal, a shift of perspective is needed. One has to lose the world for a moment and subtract oneself. For “the resolve [the Entschluß] to philosophize throws itself purely into thinking—thinking is alone with itself [das Denken ist einsam bei sich selbst]—it throws itself as if into a boundless ocean, all the bright colours, all the bases are gone, all other friendly lights are extinguished.” Thinking is alone with itself,18 thinking itself, thinking itself beside itself, and this “besidedness” of thinking allows for a peculiar experience of freedom. For freedom, as Hegel argued elsewhere, is being with oneself in an other (bei sich selbst sein im Anderen); in philosophy thinking is with itself as an other, in itself as othering, as other-thinking. Such othering of thinking, philosophy, comes with the loss of all grounds, a moment of creative disorientation. This is why “it is natural that the spirit, in its aloneness with itself, is overcome by a kind of horror [Grauen]; it does not yet … know where it is going. Among what has disappeared there is much that one would not give up at any price in the world, and one is uncertain whether it will find itself again.” The resolve to think—and it is an odd kind of resolve—takes courage because it leads into a domain where we cannot but feel horror. Thinking is horrible, it anguishes, for in it we give up all certainties, including those concerning thinking. Thinking thinking by means of thinking confronts us with such loss, because it is no longer we who are in charge, but thinking itself: it thinks in us and it is unclear where it will take us. This is why Hegel thinks that it takes courage to think: thinking consists in working with the anguish of thinking. But this also means that it is not just a matter of individual courage. It is rather the courage of something in me—the heart.

Hegel had already articulated this strange courage in dramatic terms at the beginning of his Science of Logic, where he stated: “Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinæ, a Roman even said, and still more ought the Christian to find himself in this state of indifference.”19 This is Hegel citing Horace’s line about a hero who is undaunted even by the collapse of the entire world. This line provides the motto to a book—Science of Logic—which depicts how thinking discovers and invents thinking by means of thinking. Thought here is not merely theoretical, abstracting from all particular and determinate beings in order to arrive at (the most abstract account of) being as such. (This is what the infamous beginning of Hegel’s book depicts.) Rather, there is something equally practical in this orientation. In order to begin thinking the world from the perspective of thought, Hegel suggests, one has to sever all ties to particular beings and suspend all considerations of whether thinking is of any possible use or benefit or if it will do harm. In thinking—thinking anew by means of thinking alone—one unbinds and detaches oneself to the extreme point of Horace’s hero. This courage to unbind, to lose it all, is what makes thought possible in the first place.20 The world breaks down, but this is—in a way similar to Heidegger—the possible beginning of creation.21

A Desire Called Lenin

Fredric Jameson once punned on Lyotard’s idea of “a desire called Marx” (a desire for emancipation) and suggested there also exists “a desire called Lenin,” a desire to infuse politics with truth.22 For Lenin insists over and over again on the need to speak truth to the masses. To speak it trenchantly, and the more trenchant the better. This is the task of Lenin’s theory and practice of slogans. It is supposed to allow for the right kind of pointed and condensed punctuation of a situation by means of which one articulates its truth. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued that the slogan is practical as well as theoretical. By naming a specific task at a particular moment in time, and realizing part of this task—which lies in identifying the task in the first place—it is integral to the concrete analysis of concrete situations. Why would such a politics of truth-articulation need courage? Because, as Lenin proclaims in 1917, one can “only remain faithful to Marxism today if one treats insurrection,” the prevalent form of class struggle at that time, “as an art.”23 Insurrection needs courage because it is co-constitutive with the reality into which it intervenes through the very way it intervenes in it. It does not have an objective grounding, but necessitates a leap, an act, a commitment. When Lenin seeks to reply to the fear that such an approach will never allow the Bolsheviks to take over, hold, and transform state power, he cites a passage from Engels’s 1851 “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.”

The cited passage itself includes a citation, this time from Danton, from a speech where Danton demanded the implementation of universal rules of conduct for all citizens.24 So, Danton-Engels-Lenin25—quite a trio of manly courage. This is the passage that Lenin cites: Engels “summed up the lessons of all revolution in respect to armed uprisings in the words of”—and now Lenin is citing Engels—“Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known: de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace.”26 What is needed for emancipatory insurrection to be efficacious is repeated audacity. But, as we know, this will end in disaster. How does one deal with a disaster of the politics of truth?

In 1922, two years before his death, Lenin gives a peculiar answer to this problem in a text called “On Ascending a High Mountain.”27 It describes the fictitious situation of a climber on “a very high and … unexplored mountain.” He has “overcome unprecedented difficulties … and … succeeded in reaching a much higher point” than anyone before, “but still has not reached the summit.” He then gets to “a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed …, but positively impossible.” Descent is the only option. Finding another path. But descending proves even “more dangerous … than the ascent.” The risk of undoing can sometimes be greater than the risk of doing. The climber experiences “moments of despondency,” but, Lenin adds, “in all probability these moments would be more numerous” if the climber

heard the voices of those … who … from a safe distance … ring with malicious joy … “He’ll fall in a minute! Serves him right, the lunatic! … Happily … our imaginary traveller cannot hear the voices … They would probably nauseate him. And … this does not help one to keep a clear head …, particularly at high altitudes.

Reaching the limit point of a certain conceptually oriented political practice produces a lack of courage, a form of exhaustion. But in such a situation it is crucial, according to Lenin, to distinguish between the objective invalidation (of a concept) and its subjective saturation.28 To make this distinction one needs the courage to be cautious not to fuse one with the other. It is better to turn a deaf ear to those who were not involved in the practice in the first place. This is not to say: ignore failure. Rather, what’s needed is to explore whether the point of impossibility that’s been reached allows for reinvention or not.

Lenin suggests that an adequate critique can only be performed from the immanent standpoint of the practice that failed—on condition that this practice was an emancipatory one (or tried to be). To produce knowledge about this failure—a failure that determines the present—one needs to identify what is impossible in the failed practice and make that the starting point of immanent self-criticism. This would be a way of studying the limits of one’s own time, and of folding them onto themselves. Working through these limits might even turn out to be a way of continuing the practice by means of radical reflection. Real impossibility might then not only be a stepping stone to and starting point for an individual form of courage, but a collective one. To give this another twist: one needs audacity to work with the knowledge that one does not know how to be courageous anymore. And part of that means the audacity to reinvent what courage means. Once individual and collective courage become impossible, as Kant and Solzhenitsyn claimed, one needs audacity to reinvent courage in times of the loss of courage and not simply give it up. The question is: How to mobilize the seemingly paralyzing knowledge that one does not even know how to create a novel concept of courage? The answer might lie in leaving this very knowledge aside for a moment and audaciously believing that we can be courageous, nevertheless.

Continued from Part 1