10
Confidence in life
Anyone who has seen a small child burst out laughing has seen everything of this life.
– CHRISTIAN BOBIN
Confidence in life is both an obvious thing and hard to define. We have already come across it several times in the course of our reflections, but without exactly specifying its nature. To have confidence in life is to bet on the future, to believe in the creative power of action, and to embrace uncertainty rather than be afraid of it. It can be all that at once, but it is also more than that.
It’s to believe that there is something in life, in all life, that is good, maybe even loving. It’s to continue to love life even when it seems hard. It’s thinking that life doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth living. To put it in its simplest form: having confidence in life is to think that life is a good thing overall. To believe that deep within the world, despite the ugliness that sometimes surfaces, there is a tenderness, a light that all of us have glimpsed and can never forget. We don’t really need to know where it comes from. We don’t always know what we have confidence in when we have confidence in life. We have confidence, that’s all. A confidence that has no object, pure confidence.
During the trials that await us, facing the difficulties we will encounter, in the depths of the darkest nights, we can warm ourselves at the memory of this flame. To have confidence in life is to have confidence in this glow, even when it weakens. We can have confidence in it because it doesn’t go out, as long as we are still alive. Our trust in it will keep us from being knocked down at the slightest disillusion, and we won’t lose our taste for life though it has disappointed us. Trusting it will allow us to have a more creative relationship with our abilities, as we will more readily venture out of our comfort zone and go toward others.
While self-confidence comes from competence, and while it is built on our relationships with others, the necessary medium for its existence, its nurturing soil, is confidence in life.
The Greek sages, whether Stoics or Epicureans, did not see ‘life’ the way Jesus and the Christians would later come to see it. Nor does it have the same meaning for a vitalist philosopher like Bergson, or for a mystic like Etty Hillesum. It has a different meaning again for philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, for whom living comes down primarily to inhabiting the world. According to our particular sensibility, we will find ourselves choosing sides with one or another. But all of these figures talk to us about having confidence in life. All of them tell us that to have confidence in oneself comes down in one way or another to having confidence in life.
According to the Stoics, life is a good thing because it courses with cosmic energy. The cosmos is a closed world, rational and divine, at whose heart we live. Try as we may, we can never deflect the course of fate. If we focus our efforts to coincide with the direction that fate is moving in, we will be carried along with the current and our actions will be amplified, crowning us with triumph. But if our actions run counter to the movement of fate, we will soon enough discover the powers that rule the world, even as we experience failure. For the Stoics, as we can see, the cosmos is in the end fairly benign: either it carries us along or it instructs us. How can we not have confidence in life? We live in a harmonious cosmos, and each of our actions puts us in contact with this harmony. For the Stoics, having confidence in life is having confidence in fate.
To the Epicureans as well, life is intrinsically good, but for the opposite reason to that of the Stoics. According to Epicurus and Lucretius, who were physicists as well as philosophers, everything that happens is contingent: reality is made of atoms that have met by chance. Everything that is could just as well not be: our bodies, the water we drink, the beauty of the world. Beings have no reason to be! The simple fact that a being has coalesced is a miracle in itself. It is a miracle that things exist, and my own individual existence is also a miracle. I too might not have been, and yet I am! Having confidence in life, for the Epicureans, is having confidence in chance, in the infinite scope of the field of possibilities. Atoms can combine and recombine endlessly to compose material things and living bodies. How can I not believe in life when it has given me the chance to exist, although my life was in no way foreordained? And what a wonderful way to keep things in perspective! We worry less about the chance of failure when we take into account the extraordinary victory of being alive at all. Furthermore, the elementary particles that compose us are eternal. We will die as individuals, but those particles will be reconstituted as other bodies. They will never stop celebrating the union of life and chance. Contemporary astrophysicists confirm the intuitions of the early atomists: we are composed of stardust, of electrons and neutrons that emerged from the Big Bang and which will survive us, giving material reality to the feelings of eternity that we sometimes experience. The life that inhabits us is vastly larger than we are. It was born more than thirteen billion years ago and won’t end with us.
To Christians as well, the life that beats within us is larger than ourselves. Life is good, being the will of God. Have confidence, Jesus tells us, because everything is already here: love is not in heaven but deep in your own hearts. This confidence is more than a hope: you have only to believe in it, and the kingdom of God is at hand. That is the power of confidence, which has the same Latin root – fides – as faith.
‘Whoever has seen a small child burst into laughter has seen everything of life,’ wrote the essayist and poet Christian Bobin in Épuisement (Exhaustion). His poetry points us to the presence of God in the simplest things: a child’s laughter, wrinkles on a face, the flight of a dragonfly, a robin’s breast. To a Christian mystic like Christian Bobin, Jesus’ brief passage on earth transfigured the world, and nothing has been the same since. ‘The scents of flowers are words from another world,’ he says in Les ruines du ciel (The Ruins of Heaven). This other world is the kingdom of God, which is our kingdom also, but which we don’t know how to see. The aim of poetry is to sensitise us again to this loveliest of worlds, which carries a trace of the original Love. How can we not have confidence when even the most prosaic things bear a trace of Jesus’ passage? From this mystical perspective, confidence in life borders on surrender – the opposite of mastery. To have confidence in life is to surrender to its mystery.
‘We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,’ said Emerson, ‘which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.’ Like Christian Bobin, he holds that to have confidence is to allow the beams of this ‘immense intelligence’ to pass through us. When we think we are discerning truth or justice using only our human faculties, we are in fact letting God enlighten us. Emerson goes so far as to say that ‘we do nothing by ourselves’. How better to express that self-confidence can’t be considered simply a question of mastery: an element of surrender always enters into it. This is something we can all understand, even if we don’t believe in God.
Life, according to the philosopher Henri Bergson, is infused neither with cosmic energy nor with the love of God but with the élan vital, the vital impetus, a kind of primordial creativity that runs through all living things and is responsible both for the continuity of different species and the development of individual beings. Life is good because it is a pure force of change, of transformation. This life force is manifest in the growth of plants and the ability of ivy to make its way around obstacles, in the cunning of the fox and the speed of the horse, in our practical intelligence and the creative genius of our greatest artists. In each case, it is the same élan vital but in a different form. To have confidence in life is to have confidence in the creative force that wants to express itself through us, which takes obstacles as a pretext to show its full powers. ‘Joy’, writes Bergson in Creative Evolution, ‘is always the announcement that life has succeeded, that it has gained ground, that it has notched a victory: every great joy has a triumphal note.’ We do feel joy when we manage to wrench ourselves from acting automatically and are creative: that’s when we feel truly alive. This upswelling of joy tells us that we not only have confidence in ourselves but in the creative power of life itself: it is this power that overflows in our joy.
And confidence in life can, finally, take the form of confidence in the world. According to Husserl, we have no choice but to believe in this world. To be put into this world is to be invited to have confidence in it, or else no human life would be possible. On the day of our birth, we were entrusted to the world. To have confidence in life is also to have faith in the world. It’s to consider that confidence, and not distrust, comes first. Without confidence of this kind, which Husserl qualifies as ‘original’ and ‘a universal ground’, we would feel we were living in a hostile, foreign universe. Madness would infect us. A primary belief in the world is not a decision, rather it is the condition for all our future decisions, our future trust, and our future distrust as well. How can we have confidence in ourselves if we don’t have at least the minimum confidence in a world that is real and where we have our place?
This helps us better understand why the contemplation of nature does us so much good: it reminds us that we are at home in the world, our world. Some artists know how to depict this original feeling and move us for this reason. Merleau-Ponty believed Cézanne was one of these artists, for instance when he painted the different versions of Sainte-Victoire Mountain. In the painter’s brushwork, Merleau-Ponty sees the shimmering of the world at the moment when it first reveals itself to us, first resolves into the world. And Cézanne’s mountain does not look to us like an object at a great distance but one that is caught in the same fabric as ourselves, part of the same flesh of the world, showing the same original confusion between the world and us. That’s why ecological issues are so important: to take care of the world is also to take care of ourselves. Having confidence in life, for Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, is having confidence in a world that is not separate from us but of the same flesh. The world does not belong to us. We belong to the world. For that reason, it’s natural to venture out into it.
For all that the Stoics talk about the cosmos as ultimate rationality, they are forever dazzled by the mystery of its existence. The Epicureans may have developed a materialist approach based on atoms, but their whole philosophy is a meditation on the mystery of the contingent, and therefore on life. Christians, for their part, openly embrace mystery and are all the more convincing when they do – as in the case of Søren Kierkegaard and Christian Bobin – rather than when they betray mystery by claiming to elucidate it, which makes faith a matter of dogmas and values. The Bergsonian élan vital is just as mysterious, being a spiritual force that endows matter with life. And mysterious also is the ‘flesh of the world’ that Merleau-Ponty describes and that he calls the subject of Cézanne’s art, and the first truth of the world: there is nothing behind it, nothing in front of or beyond it, but everything is there, in its palpable thickness, offered to our perception.
All these schools of thought recognise the mystery inherent in life. To think that confidence simply depends on mastery would be to turn away from this mystery, to avoid looking at it full on. No solid confidence can be built on an avoidance of this kind. True confidence certainly requires that we have a mastery of some kind, but it also requires that we are able to surrender to what is beyond us, what is bigger than us – what we call, for want of a better term, cosmos, God, or life.
This is the paradoxical lesson to be taken from our trip through the history of the philosophies of life: to have confidence in ourselves is to learn to rub up against the mystery of life, to welcome it to the point that contact with it warms us.
We are a long way from the usual metaphors that life coaches turn to, particularly the more uninspired among them. Their analogies tend to draw on computer science or classical mechanics: there is much talk of ‘reprogramming’, of ‘finding one’s user manual’, of taking a hard look at one’s ‘software’, when it’s not a question of the ‘combination to the safe’. Anyone who makes an internet search for ‘self-confidence’ will immediately stumble across this kind of metaphor, alongside the ‘seven techniques to develop self-assurance’ and the ‘three keys to confidence’. Besides these metaphors, the search will turn up methods that rely on pure autosuggestion, along the lines of the Coué Method: ‘Rise every morning and tell yourself that things are better today than they were yesterday’, ‘Look yourself in the mirror when you get up and tell yourself you are a genius’, ‘State your goals loudly and clearly’, etc.
These instructions are both stupid and unhelpful – stupid because they deny the complexity of the human spirit, and unhelpful because they are likely to increase our sense of guilt when we suffer from anxiety. If I lack self-confidence and someone tells me that it’s easy to acquire it, that all I need to do is ‘reprogram’ myself in seven days and motivate myself every morning in front of my mirror, how am I going to feel if it doesn’t work? Am I not going to feel even more responsible, even more at fault? I am struck by the brutality of these instructions, their lack of compassion.
Our habits are not like bits of twisted metal that we just need to untwist with a dose of motivation: we are not machines. Our thoughts are not defective programs that need to be rebooted: we are not computers. We are not going to blossom into our full potential just by saying positive things while standing tall in front of our mirrors and breathing deeply. It’s not with self-persuasion or self-manipulation that we are going to free ourselves from what holds us back.
There is no user manual for a human life. In fact, that’s why we’re free and can choose the meaning of our existence. And even if our truth was tucked inside a safe, it would take more than a ‘combination’ to uncover it: it would take time, a great deal of attention, patience, love, and that precious capacity to not try to understand everything, to relax into the mystery of life.
One of the reasons for our lack of self-confidence is that life is hard and full of uncertainty. We will not shake off our fear of life by running from it and pursuing a fantasy of reprogramming our neurons or looking for our ‘personal user manual’ but by finding a way to live with our fear and lessen the threat of what frightens us. Life is living up to its reputation when it veers from what we expect of it – whether for good or ill. If it corresponded to our expectations, it wouldn’t be life but a program executing its pre-planned course – and we couldn’t trust it.
Our discussion has already touched on the transformation of competence into confidence, the leap by which simple mastery can turn into true freedom and boldness. Only confidence in life can make this leap possible.
This was confirmed to me in an unexpected way during a lecture I gave on an airplane carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, at the Toulon naval base. I was speaking to a dozen officers of the French fleet’s flagship and their commanding officer, Marc-Antoine de Saint-Germain.
My lecture was about confidence, and I was happy to share my ideas with them but slightly nervous at the same time. I suddenly wondered whether the notion of a self-confidence based on confidence in the mystery of life was not one of those concepts that philosophers cook up but that prove inadequate in the face of facts. To explain to these military men who were soon redeploying to combat ISIS that their confidence should draw strength from the mystery of life suddenly seemed foolhardy, not to say absurd.
Intimidated by my audience, I soon found myself almost a child again, asking awestruck questions of his heroes. Their answers fascinated me. Particularly those of two pilots of the Dassault Rafale fighter jet, who gave me a detailed account of night landings on an airplane carrier. And they explained the crucial role of the LSO, the landing signals officer. During a night landing, the pilot cannot trust his instruments or his visual cues from the aircraft carrier – when he can see anything at all. He has to trust the spoken instructions radioed to him by the LSO, who stands on the carrier’s deck. The LSO guides the pilot ‘by voice’ in lining up the aircraft on the runway’s axis for his approach pattern. The pilot has to ‘surrender’ to the orders of the LSO. Even if he sees something, he can’t trust his own eyes but has to follow his comrade’s instructions with blind confidence. The pilot’s self-confidence comes not only from his own highly developed mastery of piloting, but also from the absolute confidence he has in his LSO. What we find here, closely interlinked, are two major components of self-confidence: the technical component and the relationship component. But there’s more. In his own words, each of the pilots explained that these two components were not enough to give a person full self-confidence. ‘No question, you have to have faith!’ said the first, while I was questioning him further about aircraft carrier landings. ‘Inshallah,’ the second added, to describe his state of mind when the runway comes up. Technical confidence and confidence in others are not everything. They draw on a primordial source, confidence in life, which is hard to define but easy enough to feel. This confidence in life is not a confidence in something. It is confidence.
And this first confidence is something that, in one way or another, we all have. We don’t all feel it the same way or call it by the same name, and it can vary in strength according to the kind of childhood we’ve had, but we all have it. Because we are alive.
To try and bring it a little more clearly into focus, let’s look at this mystical dimension of self-confidence in what is perhaps its purest form: as it exists in those who have survived the worst horrors and still retain their confidence in life, and among the exceptional souls who have turned from the comforts of normal life to experience life in its most naked form.
Antoine Leiris lost his wife in the terrorist attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris on 13 November 2015. A few days later, he wrote a letter to his wife’s assassins, which he posted on Facebook and later turned into a book, You Will Not Have My Hate:
On Friday night, you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. You are dead souls. If that God for whom you blindly kill made us in his image, each bullet in my wife’s body will have been a wound in his heart.
So, no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. That is what you want, but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same ignorance that made you what you are. You want me to be scared, to see my fellow citizens through suspicious eyes, to sacrifice my freedom for security. You have failed. I will not change. […]
Of course I am devastated by grief, I grant you that small victory, but it will be short-lived. I know she will be with us every day and that we will see each other in the paradise of free souls to which you will never have access.
There are only two of us – my son and myself – but we are stronger than all the armies of the world. Anyway, I don’t have any more time to waste on you, as I must go to see Melvil, who is just waking up from his nap. He is only seventeen months old. He will eat his snack as he does every day, then we will play as we do every day, and all his life this little boy will defy you by being happy and free. Because you will not have his hate either.
This poignant letter demonstrates that even when life is unfair, when stupidity and hatred wreak a trail of destruction, we can still have faith in life. ‘All his life this little boy will defy you by being happy and free,’ says the father splendidly. This act of causing offense is how life deals with what threatens it. Of course, the war is not over. There will be difficult moments, moments of doubt and downheartedness. But that’s exactly what the feeling of confidence is about. It’s confidence in spite of everything. Having confidence in life doesn’t mean thinking that life is simple and that its meaning is obvious. If that were the case, there would be no need to ‘have confidence’ in it. A bunch of drugged and brainless fanatics murdered Antoine Leiris’s wife along with 129 other people in a bloodbath at the Bataclan theatre. Antoine Leiris knows that this, too, is part of his life. But when he talks about his son, who will continue to ‘eat his snack’, to play, and grow up to be a free man, we get a taste of what confidence in life can really be. It’s precisely when life is threatened that we most need to show our confidence. We have all been living this, ever since 11 September 2001, ever since we entered this new age of terrorism. Our lives, our way of life, have been attacked, and our free civilisation as well. Fighters have declared war on it. At any moment, a suicide bomber may blow himself up, taking innocent lives with him. Having more confidence in life than ever is one response to this troubling state of war in a time of peace.
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin evokes the mystery of this confidence in life which doesn’t so much resist everything that might destroy it as flare out in the very presence of what threatens it: ‘This past, the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life …; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own … – this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful … That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it, knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life … The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school.’ The fact that there is ‘something very beautiful’ in the midst of all the horrors Baldwin describes is precisely the heart of life, of this mysterious phenomenon of confidence. The child who ‘walks through mobs’ is Ruby Bridges, the first black child to desegregate an all-white school in Louisiana in 1960. She was six years old and had to face the violence and insults of outraged racists. From her courage and determination at that young age, we can see how a confidence in life can play its part in the most immediate battles, the struggle for a more just world. With every further step taken by Ruby Bridges, we understand how right we are to have confidence in life. The most valiant political struggles often originate at this most mysterious source.
If confidence in life can paradoxically be strengthened in times of tragedy, it can also reach great heights in conditions of extreme destitution. The great mystics have seen a glint of light in the blackest darkness.
Etty Hillesum was a young Dutch woman, born into a Jewish family in 1914, who kept an extraordinary diary: An Interrupted Life. She tells what happened to her between March 1941, when she was living freely in Amsterdam, and September 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz, where she would die with her parents and brother. A cultivated, troubled woman who lived her life fully and had many lovers, often considerably older than she, Etty Hillesum was undergoing therapy in 1941 with the psychologist Julius Spier, a follower of Carl Jung, who would become her spiritual guide. It was he who urged her to seek a path toward her unusual desire. It was also he who introduced her to the Gospels, to the works of Saint Augustine and Meister Eckhart. She writes in her diary that she had the impression of being truly reborn as herself thanks to this relationship with her therapist. She also describes Spier as having led her to God. Armed with her new faith, she experienced the pure joy of living. She wanted to love and to share, to help and to embrace – sometimes to excess, as she recognises with a touch of humour: ‘It is sometimes difficult to live on equally good terms with God and one’s lower parts.’ But the round-ups of Jews were becoming more intense. At first, the Nazis sent Dutch Jews to the transit camp at Westerbork, ‘the antechamber of the Holocaust’, from which convoys regularly left for Auschwitz. She managed to escape the round-ups but watched her friends being taken away, her people. She didn’t want to be left in isolation from her own kind. She applied to the Jewish Council for transfer to the Westerbork camp so that she could work in the department of Social Welfare for People in Transit. She wanted to be useful to those who were suffering and bring light where there was darkness: ‘One would like to be a balm for all these wounds,’ she wrote. At Westerbork, she felt that she had found her place. She was reunited with her parents and brother, but also united with all her many brothers and sisters who were being swept up and deported. She devoted herself to a single task in the camp hospital: making daily life a little more bearable. She set about it with joyous compassion, surprisingly light-hearted at times, deploying all her ingenuity. She gave care and reassurance, spoke out or held her tongue, brought food when she could, looked after babies when the exhausted mothers could no longer hold them. Those who survived used the same word over and over to describe her: she exuded radiance. Yet she quickly realised what others couldn’t or wouldn’t see: that the trains leaving Westerbork were on a one-way trip to death.
‘I feel enormous confidence,’ she wrote. ‘Not the certainty that external life will turn out well for me, but the certainty that I will continue to accept life and find it good, even in its worst moments.’ Reading her exceptional diaries and letters, one discovers a young woman of twenty-eight who, day after day, retained her confidence in life, in God, and in man, even to the brink of unnameable horror: ‘It would take only one man worthy of the name for a person to believe in man, in all mankind,’ she wrote in her diary.
Her trust in life was not blind to the staggering evil that men were capable of. She simply accepted all of life; she consented to it: ‘Life and death, suffering and joy, blisters on one’s painfully bruised feet, jasmine growing behind the house, persecutions, numberless atrocities, all, all are in me and form a powerful whole, I accept it all as an indivisible totality.’ In a letter dated 8 June 1943, she wrote:
The sky is full of birds, the purple lupines extend with majestic calm, two little old ladies came and settled on the crate to gossip, the sun is streaming down on my face, and a massacre is taking place under our eyes; everything is so incomprehensible. I am well. Affectionately, Etty.
As she so accurately says, she is ‘well’ because she accepts the incomprehensible. In this extreme situation, she maintains her confidence because she has stopped trying to understand everything. She consents to the mystery of a life that contains much evil and much good. ‘Of course, it is complete extermination, but let us at least endure it with grace,’ she wrote a few days before leaving for Auschwitz.
We have here an example of the mystical dimension of confidence, an example of confidence in its pure state: the opposite of mastery, the inordinately heightened surrender to what is greater than oneself: ‘We are at home. Wherever the sky extends, we are at home. At every point on this earth, we are at home when we carry everything within us.’
In every culture, and at every stage in human history, sages have renounced the immediate gratifications of life and even its most elementary comforts in order to renew contact with the barest form of existence. Stoic philosophers, Christian monks, Buddhists, Hindu sannyasins – they weren’t torn from their comforts forcibly by any particular event. They voluntarily gave up the non-essential, the better to experience the essential and strengthen their confidence in life, without falsehood or mediation. Having stripped as much as possible of the ordinary stuff of life away, they touched life’s very heart. The actions of Etty Hillesum, who went voluntarily to the Westerbork transit camp, place her within this tradition.
The example of these men and women, which is so radical that it is sometimes difficult to conceive, may help us when we are dogged by bad luck or assailed by an unexpected turn of events.
To still have confidence in life when we experience a setback in love or a wound to our ego is to have internalised the wisdom of the Stoic sages.
To continue to believe that life is an opportunity after meeting with defeat is to take a page from the wisdom of the Epicureans.
To love life when one has suffered the cruelty of man and the injustice of the system is to have a bit of Etty Hillesum in one’s breast.
To develop an ability to bounce back and draw on creative resources when confronted with adversity is to glimpse the power of Bergson’s élan vital.
To suddenly feel, while in the midst of being severely tested, a mad joy welling up inside, to sense that one would be able to love life even if it were to grant us nothing that we expect of it, is to make contact in the depths of oneself with this primary confidence, to draw close to the source of all the different forms of confidence.