Romain Rolland on pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will
He said it first
The phase “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is usually ascribed to the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, but he was only using a phrase from the French leftist Romain Rolland in his own notebooks. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1915, Rolland was a pacifist and leftist in politics and a kind of polymath in art, for example holding the first chair in music history at the Sorbonne as well writing essays, plays, and novels. Herman Hesse dedicated Siddhartha to him. The phrase appears in the last paragraph of Rolland’s review of Raymond Lefebvre’s Le Sacrifice d’Abraham, a novel about a French scholar and conservative propagandist who effectively sacrificed his son for his own reputation, published in L’Humanité in 1920.
Rolland
But what I especially love in Raymond 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.
It is this natural bravery that is the flower of a good people, which “does not need to hope to undertake and to succeed to persevere,” but which lives in struggle over and above suffering, doubt, the blasts of nothingness because his fiery life is the negation of death. And because his doubt itself, the French “What do I know?” becomes the weapon of hope, barring the road to discouragement and saying to his dreams of action and revolution: “Why not?”
Gramsci
In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci used the phrase in describing a contemporary.
Guicciardini’s scepticism (not pessimism of the intelligence, which can be combined with an optimism of the will in active and realistic politicians)
In 1932, he wrote, in a work published in a posthumous volume, Passato e presente:
On daydreams and fantasies. They show lack of character and passivity. One imagines that something has happened to upset the mechanism of necessity. One’s own initiative has become free. Everything is easy. One can do whatever one wants, and one wants a whole series of things which at present one lacks.
It is basically the present turned on its head which is projected into the future. Everything repressed is unleashed.
On the contrary, it is necessary to direct one’s attention violently towards the present as it is, if one wishes to transform it. Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.
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