Second chances in the "best of all possible worlds"

We were facing the sea, in that northern Barcelona that is San Sebastián, when Eudald Carbonell told me: "It has been known for years that humanity is heading straight for a subsistence crisis, but nothing happens, it's what has to happen for everything to continue naturally." It happened in 2014, during a break in the densely programmed congress Physis (XI International Ontology Congress), whose promotional poster, by the way, displays a beautiful work that Eduardo Chillida conceived at the origins of the event. We had gone out to breathe the sea breeze and to put both the speculations of pre-Socratic wise men and the disconcertingly inspiring theories of quantum physics in parentheses. But that perspective on the evolution of the species by the egregious professor ---whom an online encyclopedia describes as "prehistorian, archaeologist, anthropologist, geologist, and paleontologist"---, that consideration of a physis exempt from any form of existential drama fueled my perplexity in front of the immensity of molten metal.

How to assume that when things go wrong ---or so it seems, without much room for doubt--- the course they take is necessarily the one it should be? In the century of enlightenment, one of the most memorable philosophical parodies took place. Voltaire decided to ridicule in his Candide Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's assertion ---who died on November 14, 1716, when Voltaire was about to turn 22--- according to which we live "in the best of all possible worlds".

Pangloss, a cruel caricature of the German scholar ---comparable to Aristophanes' hilarious deformation of Socrates in The Clouds--- lectures the good Candide in the worst imaginable situations (Lisbon earthquake, slavery, epidemics, and other calamities) that dramatically contradict that high-sounding assertion. Especially if "best possible world" is understood as synonymous with "perfect world." Something that Leibniz, a scientist and metaphysician like Descartes, and author of a Theodicy ---a philosophical theology--- would hardly have agreed to.

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Evidently God does not want evil ---theologians tell us since the time of Saint Augustine--- but He does not prevent it because He leaves in the hands of His creature the possibility of managing affections and appetites, and in short, of acting in a truly autonomous way. A world in which free will exists would seem, in this sense, "better" than one in which everything was predetermined, necessarily governed by external or internal factors (such as instinctive dispositions); even if the former implies that many of the decisions and the events derived from them turn out to be harmful, and injustices are perpetuated. Returning to Leibniz's argument precisely today may seem even more unfounded, modernity itself having been subjected, critical of religion during the Enlightenment (Voltaire), to a new critique, that of postmodernity, which fueled the work of someone as little metaphysical as Friedrich Nietzsche.

Returning to Leibniz's argument precisely today may seem even more unfounded, modernity itself having been subjected to a new critique

His denunciation of positivism and of the belief in the progress of reason fertilizes the thought of the 20th and 21st centuries, making practically inconceivable that idea of Leibniz, according to which we inhabit the "best of all possible worlds." And, nevertheless, to accept with full freedom what seems destined to berepresents a movement of the spirit that summarizes a Latin expression much appreciated by Nietzsche himself, that ofamor fati("love of fate"). Who can, in any case, live up to such acceptance? In the first of the speeches of Zaratustra(1883) it is explained that the third transformation of the spirit, the highest, corresponds to the child. Creator and destroyer, true alter ego of the superman, he is characterized as a "holy yes-sayer": he loves what he is being, what he determines for himself in his own present, without getting trapped in a traumatic past nor in the agonizing anticipation of what is to come.

To accept extra-morally reality in the instant that one traverses and co-creates, as if it were to repeat itself in an "eternal return," is one of the fundamental traits of the superman, who neither renounces nor disqualifies painful experiences: "To create, that is the great redemption from suffering, that is how life becomes light. But for the creator to exist, sufferings and many transformations are necessary (…) to be the child that is born again, to be that the creator himself must also want to be the birthing mother and the pains of the birthing mother." A second chance is given to us with crisis ---we can read in so many places, indeed--- but not without pain, which is really what we consider unacceptable. The Zarathustrian expression "to sink into one's own sunset" or untergehen is a condition of possibility for surfacing and transcending. Friedrich Schelling, in that same century, had already written in his Essay on Human Freedom and Related Objects that the seed must sink into deep darkness, traverse a long night to be able to bear fruit.

The pandemic not only causes a host of undesirable situations. It represents an opportunity to take seriously issues as pressing as social inequalities or the climate challenge. The split between man and nature is an unquestionable and traumatic reality. "Where man dwells is no longer Earth," Martin Heidegger expressed in his interview for Spiegel (1966), which, in a sense not only ontological but pragmatic, can indeed push us to abandon the matrix realm, as recounted in Interstellar (even if scientists have pointed out that the most inhospitable place on Earth is incomparably more benevolent than apparently habitable planets). It is no secret that Christopher Nolan's film, which incorporates some of the theses of quantum physics, pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the programmatic music of Also sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss, in turn illustrates the evolutionary leaps up to the final rebirth, with the magical appearance of the "star-child," and the disruption of the linear conception of time.

These are times that invite us to train ourselves in uncertainty, cumbersome but necessary to discover hidden aspects of oneself, potentially fruitful.

Long before the coachingand also of the counterintuitive paradigm inaugurated by quantum physics, a pre-Socratic sage, Heraclitusthe dark, he wrote: "It is not better for men that all they wish should happen."The redoubt of Reality that resists being understood, manipulated, or transformed by man simultaneously offers the possibility of rebirth, or at least of reconsidering the conditions for a more dignified life. Possibility that opens precisely in the painful moment when dignity seems annulled. From positive psychology, in any case, it is insisted that we cannot choose what will happen, but we can choose how we respond to it. These times invite us to train ourselves in uncertainty, cumbersome due to the breaking of all forms of tranquility or comfort, but necessary to discover hidden aspects of oneself, as well as potentially fruitful occupations or ventures, until then shrouded in darkness.

As in most chivalric novels, for us too the second outing could be "the good one", undertaken with determination from the awareness of one's own fragility.

Rediscovering the finitude that constitutes us from a perspective as broad as the one Eudald Carbonell suggested to me, can function as an anchor in the present moment, inviting us to extract the best from ourselves.As in most chivalric novels, for us too it could be the second sallythe good one; the one undertaken by the brave with determination from the awareness of their fragility. The unfortunate character of Leibniz's expression represents, however, an incentive for walking on the wire to be a happy practice or, at least, one that leads to a deeper and more fulfilling awareness.rootingVoltaire ended Candide's misfortunes with an invitation to practice a kind of moral imperative, which in its poetic formulation ---"one must cultivate one's garden--- does not hide the commitment to the fruits obtained and even builds a bridge to Leibniz.

To understand that the "best of all possible worlds" is not a perfect world, finished a priori, but perfectible, under construction, means for men and women of the 21st century to avoid the sterile shortcut of cynicism and assume, in a second and who knows if definitive opportunity, their responsibility as creators.