I
It seems to me that José Vasconcelos has found a formula on pessimism and optimism that not only defines the feeling of the new Ibero-American generation in the face of the contemporary crisis, but also absolutely corresponds to the mentality and sensitivity of an epoch in which, having spited the thesis of Don José Ortega y Gasset on the “disenchanted soul” and “the twilight of revolutions,” millions of men work with a mystical ardor and a religious passion, to create a new world. “Pessimism of reality, optimism of the ideal,” this is Vasconcelos’ formula.
“Never conform to ourselves, but always be beyond and superior in an instant,” — Vasconcelos writes — “Repudiation of reality and a struggle to destroy it, but not out of an absence of faith but out of a surplus of faith in human capacities and out of a firm conviction that evil is never permanent or justifiable and that it is always possible and feasible to redeem, purify, improve the collective state and the private conscience.”
The attitude of the man who sets out to correct reality is certainly more optimistic than pessimistic. He is pessimistic in his protest and in his condemnation of the present; but he is optimistic as to his hope in the future. All the great human ideals have started from a negation; but all have also been an affirmation. Religions have perennially represented in history that pessimism of reality and that optimism of the ideal that the Mexican writer preaches to us at this time.
Those of us who are not content with mediocrity, those of us who are even less content with injustice, are often designated as pessimists. But, in truth, pessimism dominates our spirit much less than optimism. We do not believe that the world should be fatally and eternally as it is. We believe it can and should be better. The optimism we reject is the easy, lazy Panglossian optimism of those who think we live in the best of all possible worlds.
II
There exist two kinds of pessimists just as there exist two kinds of optimists. Exclusively negative pessimism limits itself to confirming with a gesture of impotence and hopelessness, the misery of things and the vanity of efforts. He is a nihilist who waits, melancholically, for his last disappointment. The extreme limit, as Artzibachev said. But this type of man is fortunately not common. He belongs to a rare hierarchy of disenchanted intellectuals. He constitutes, also, a product of an epoch of decadence or of a people in collapse.
Among intellectuals, there is not uncommonly a simulated nihilism which serves as a philosophical pretext for them to refuse their cooperation to any great renewing effort or to explain their disdain for any multitudinous work. But the fictitious nihilism of this category of intellectuals is not even a philosophical attitude. It boils down to a hidden and artificial disdain for great human myths. It is an unconfessed nihilism that does not dare to peep out from the surface of the work or the life of the negative intellectual who indulges in this theoretical exercise as a solitary vice. The intellectual, a nihilist in private, is usually in public a member of an anti-alcoholic league or of a society for the protection of animals. His nihilism does not have as its object defending him and guarding him but instead the great passions. In the face of small ideals, the false nihilist behaves with the most vulgar idealism.
III
It is with the pessimistic and negative spirits of this lineage that our optimism of the ideal does not allow us to tolerate becoming confused. Absolutely negative attitudes are sterile. Action is made up of denials and affirmations. The new generation in our America [nuestra América] as in the whole world is, first of all, a generation that shouts its faith, that sings its hope.
IV
In contemporary Western philosophy there prevails a skeptical mood. This philosophical attitude, as its penetrating critics point out, is a peculiar gesture of a civilization in decline. Only in a decadent world does a disenchanted feeling of life emerge. But not even this contemporary skepticism or this relativism is without kinship, without affinity with the cheap and fictitious nihilism of the powerless, or with the absolute nihilism and morbidity of the suicidal and the madmen of Andreiev and Artzibachev. Pragmatism, which so effectively moves man to action, is at bottom a relativistic and skeptical school. Hans Vainhingher, the author of Philosophy of the ‘As If’ has justifiably been classified as a pragmatist. For this Teutonic philosopher there are no absolute truths; but there are relative truths that govern man’s life as if they were absolute. “Moral principles are on par with aesthetic ones, the criteria of law on par with the concepts on which science labors, the very foundations of logic, have no objective existence; they are our fictitious constructions, which serve only as regulatory canons of our action, which is directed as if they were true.” Thus defines the philosophy of Vainhingher, in his Guidelines of Skeptical Philosophy, the Italian philosopher Giuseppe Rensi that, as I see in a bibliographic note of the magazine of Ortega y Gasset, begins to garner interest in Spain and therefore in Spanish America.
This philosophy, then, does not invite one to renounce action. It only seeks to deny the Absolute. But it recognizes, in human history, relative truth, the temporal myth of each epoch, with the same value and the same efficacy as an absolute and eternal truth. This philosophy proclaims and confirms the necessity of myth and the usefulness of faith. Even if one then takes the time to think that all truths and all fictions, in the last analysis, are equivalent. Einstein, a relativist, behaves in life as an optimist of the ideal.
V
In the new generation, the desire to overcome skeptical philosophy burns. The materials of a new mysticism are elaborated in the contemporary chaos. The world in gestation will not put its hope where the faded religions put it. “The strong strive and struggle,” — says Vasconcelos — “with the end of somewhat anticipating the work of heaven.” The new generation wants to be strong.
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*Published in Mundial: Lima, August 21, 1925. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/pesimismo%20de%20la%20realidad.htm>.
