The coming Evil?

(Paper to be read at the Justice and Catatrophes: Silent,

Slow Moving, Invisible Catastrophe Conference,
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, March 23, 24 and 25,
2015)

This paper may be somewhat at odds with the general intent of

our conference, at least for two reasons. First, I will not address
exactly the issue of slow and invisible catastrophes in general,
be they environmental, political or socio-economical ones, but,
rather, the apocalyptic horizon towards which, each reinforcing
the others, they likely converge. Second, precisely because the
apocalyptic mode of thinking raises a number of philosophical
issues, I will assume that we are, indeed, living the Last Days,
in order to criticize the kind of moral guilt and collective
anxiety in which we are, supposedly, to wait for our abolition.
My target will be the dominant view on the ethics of the Times
of the End, first sketched by Karl Jaspers, and expounded at
length by Gnther Anders and Hans Jonas . I will rather offer a
possible (and hopefully plausible) alternative account of the
kind of moral upheavals we might experience, in the period of
time which extend from now to the End of Times.
1

Let me first clarify a number of assumptions I just made, before

I proceed further. I have little to say about the possible or
probable ways the End of Times will happen. But my first
premiss is that we do not need to ascertain one by one the
specifics of this apocalyptic process to be already convinced
that the systematic interconnection of our social and political
life with its rapidly degrading basis in nature constitutes a
global phenomenon or an all-encompassing catastrophe. It
goes without saying that there is hardly a strictly natural
disaster, when a tsunami inundates a nuclear plant, or when a

purely social disaster, the unfair allocation of land leads to

the deforestation of millions of acres of wet forests.
Furthermore, we have come to realize not only the
interdependence of all ecosystems (damaging one will end up,
sooner or later, with battering all the others), but the
geopolitical impact of many seemingly local economical or
sociopolitical responses to environmental problems. In this
respect, the intrinsic connectedness of all kinds of catastrophes
(natural and social) forces us to depart from the classical postHiroshima view that Doomsday, if it were to come, would result
from one clear-cut causal event, usually an atomic war. And
such a war would not only be the death of mankind. The
ensuing nuclear winter (as people were not long to realize)
would also bring about the destruction of the Earth as the
ultimate life-supporting system. But the punctual event-like
nature of the final lightning accustomed us to think of
Doomsday as a kind of accident, a monstrous one, indeed, but,
nevertheless, a preventable accident (for instance, by
struggling against the nuclear arms race). What I suggest is the
following: the more we understand the interconnectedness of
all disasters, the more we see them as an all-encompassing
phenomenon, the less we can think about the End of Times as a
preventable accident. On the contrary, even if we could solve a
great number of dangerous political, technological, and
environmental issues which are still in our reach, we are
overwhelmed by the dynamics of past or present decisions
which nobody could, or can, see as perilous, but which have all
now become the interwoven threads of one ongoing and
unstoppable process. The obvious fact that many of these
ongoing disasters are silent, slow, and invisible should only
worry us more. It seems, then, that we are fatally driven to the
End, as if we had no brake lever to stop the train of this world
running amok. One could already read in Jonas the idea that we
are living the Times of the End. But for Jonas, these times
rather look like a period of business as usual at least for
those who do not see the great shadow falling upon us from the

future. In any case, the only change we feel (before the nuclear
holocaust) is a change in the moral circumambient ether of our
everyday life. What the perspective of an ongoing apocalyptic
process implies is quite distinct: the Times of the End are a
period of unraveling material disasters piling one upon the
others (even though they may be, at the beginning, hard to
spot), all of them foreshadowing what the End will be made of.

My second premiss is more controversial. For I suggest that we

should seriously consider that our contemporaries are neither
blind nor plagued with cowardice, when, repeatedly confronted
to the dire consequences of their inaction, yet do nothing. It has
been a philosophical clich to lament our insensitivity to the
gloomy perspectives we face. This clich is not new, either:
from Jaspers to Anders and Jonas, who mostly referred to the
nuclear holocaust, and not so much to silent and slow
catastrophes, reviling the passivity or the blindness of ordinary
people has become a common place in ethics. But why a
growing number of us could not be rationally persuaded that it
is already too late, that we are the last people on Earth? And if
so, what moral consequences should we draw from that (very
plausible, if not settled) fact? Is it self-evident that, living with a
clear awareness that these are the Times of the End, if we do
nothing to at least try to remedy it, then our moral existence
(not only our essential dignity, but even our daily actions) must
be necessarily bad and/or shameful?

Hence my questions: Instead of merely playing with the idea of

the apocalypse, let us posit that the End is certain, even
impending (as Jonas did). What kind of tangible difference
would it make, right now, would we be doomed to go extinct in
four or five centuries, or in any period of time which we can
think of in historical terms? (By these last words, I mean, for

example, the idea that between us and the last man, there will
be no more time than between us and, say, Christopher
Columbus ). It is easy to argue that consenting to our imminent
extinction would likely lead to an unprecedented outburst of
hopeless and cynical egoism, to an even more ferocious
overexploitation of all our remaining resources, and, probably,
to destructive wars waged only to postpone for a few years our
inevitable end. Actually, thinking this way amounts to a selffulfilling prophecy. But I doubt that it would be the only moral
option available. We readily foresee the Evil which comes. But
what about the good? Could the Times of the End help us to
reconsider what is good?
2

Let me start with what seems to be the constant, and never

criticized premiss of a whole series of philosophical
considerations about the abolition of humanity: it is nothing but
an unsurpassable Evil. Unsurpassable means, here, two
things: 1) by definition, there will be no evil after (nor beyond)
it, for no evildoer will survive; 2) the End to come will not be
the classical apocalyptic End of Times, that is, a parousia (the
ultimate revelation of the hidden meaning of things), or
Judgment Day, but a dry and flat End, an Apocalypse without
Kingdom. Retroactively, such an End would then cancel, or
invalidate all the good and meaningful actions ever
accomplished by mankind since its inception as a moral species.
And we should shudder in advance at the sound of the
melancholy laughter of the Last Man, looking backward and
contemplating with corrosive bitterness the vanity of what will
have been all the morally driven endeavors of mankind until
him. There are many ways of stating this idea, but they all lead
to the conclusion that mankind, morally speaking, ought to
hope and fight for its survival. There is an absolute duty to
counteract all the harmful tendencies which may lead to its
extinction. As Jonas puts it, if the right to commit suicide

remains a debatable issue at the individual level, for humanity

as a whole, it is not and it is not, because it is a selfcontradiction. One may commit suicide for the sake of his or
her dignity as a person and as a member of humanity, but
humanity as a whole cannot forsake its own essence, and
commit suicide, because the transcendent moral horizon which,
eventually, justifies the act of one individual as a person lacks
when all the members of humanity (even those who not yet
born) are concerned. But doing nothing against our
extinction is to be collectively suicidal. Jonathan Schell, in his
forgotten best-sellers of the 1980s, pointed out how these
abstract considerations would take form in the lived experience
of the last people on Earth . Death itself would die. This motto
was popularized by Anders, but Schell stripped it of its
metaphysical obscurity. His argument is twofold. On the one
hand, he argues that the massive death that H Bomb can cause
differs from ordinary individual death in the sense that it
attacks the very possibility of any further birth. It condemns all
future living beings to not exist. In a quasi-Sadean formula,
Schell describes this as the second death of mankind: the
death of death as intrinsically part of the process of life and
renewal. On the other hand, just like all the new apocalyptic
prophets-philosophers, Schell insists on the dramatic alteration
of love, of begetting children, or of what would happen to all
the different kinds of projections which we make into the lives
of the next generations (for example, works of arts, or the
atemporal messages of spiritual wisdom which somehow extend
our punctual existence and the meaning of our lives far beyond
us) would the End become inevitable. Love, he says, would
turn into a selfish and impersonal pornographic act. Giving
birth would be nothing but a cruel way of pushing more human
fodder into the furnace. Creativity, without a future to welcome
and sanctify its objects, would fade away; for, as Anders once
said, nothing will have ever been, if nobody remembers it.
This is why, supposedly, not only we cannot withstand the idea
that mankind could be wiped out from the surface of the Earth,
3

but we should not even try to entertain such a disheartening

thought. We ought to see it as intrinsically repellent, as an
intellectual expression Evil itself.

I took some time to develop this point, because I hope it sheds a

different light on another constant of the moral theories of our
modern apocalyptic prophets. From Jasper' s contention that we
must intensify our anxiety in order to become more moral,
that is, more responsible of our collective fate, to Anders' s
duty of anxiety, and, finally, to Jonas' s heuristics of fear as
a full-blown program of ethical reform, one red thread runs all
along. It is a vision of what life is worth, or of what is worth
living, which presupposes a specific way of being affected by
the experience of life. And this affective vision is given as a
justification for a radical moral reform of mankind (bypassing,
as it has often been noted, the individual' s perspectives on
what they deem morally good or bad, to the point of implicitly
justifying that, in some cases, individual freedom ought to be
curtailed). This vision is both given an axiomatic value (with a
whole series of moral theorems to be deduced from it), and an
experiential value, as an absolutely justified anxiety which is,
so to speak, the emotional matter into which the apocalyptic
philosopher infuses the true (but until now latent) ethical form
of responsibility. Hence, this reference to anxiety tries to have it
both ways. Faced with the challenge of explaining how we could
infer anything from a purely emotional state, Jaspers, Anders,
and Jonas, appear to argue that this anxiety is actually the
emotional manifestation of a deep ontological commitment for
humanity to continue to exist which is the towering reason of
all reasons. But faced with the challenge to compensate for the
weak motivational force of any reason as a reason (for we may
lack the will to do what we should, according to the evidence),
they rely on what this reason stirs into us at the emotional
level, if we take it as a graphic enough depiction of what is to

happen. In this closed circle, not to be more and more anxious

is dangerously irrational for deep ontological reasons, whereas
all our rational activity, if ethically conscious, is bound to
accumulate more and more evidence showing that we should
worry more and more.

But if we take this premiss as litigious, we can sidestep what

has become, those last ten to twenty years, a (seemingly)
crucial question: why people do not believe that the End is
coming, and/or do nothing to oppose it (that is, they do not truly
believe the apocalyptic prophecy)? Why are they both irrational
and insensitive, that is, unmoved by the accumulating
evidence? As I suggested, Anders and Jonas tried to surmount
the classical roadblock of practical rationality by invoking a
new form of ontological (catastrophic) anxiety . But it was only
to run into another obstacle. For the ultimate anxiety that we all
should rationally feel, when faced with the evidence, is
precisely what is patently missing to our contemporaries.
Eschatological indifference reigns. To solve this conundrum, to
remedy the weakness of the motivational spring of this new
apocalyptic anxiety, many solutions have been put forward.
Some are remarkably astute (for example, Jean-Pierre Dupuy' s
hypothesis of the reality of the future within a cybernetic loop
of anticipation, an idea explicitly designed to salvage Jonas' s
heuristics of fear). They speak of Precautionary Principle, of
risk management through game-theoretic analysis, of the best
ways to ground environmental ethics, etc. But they all take for
granted that we do not really believe in the final catastrophe,
and this is why we do not act accordingly. Or, if we believe in
the evidence, we are not really moved by it . But, so far, none of
these solutions has ever produced any tangible social effect
beyond a narrow circle of impressed academics.
4

Sidestepping the current debate about these solutions may

seem odd, even extravagant. Are not the horrendous nature of
what we are heading to, and the absolute responsibility we
should assume in order to avoid it, two analytically connected
ideas? However, to confer some plausibility to my endeavor, I
will proceed in two steps. First, I will explore how exactly Evil,
and which kind of Evil, would finally prevail, as we would come
closer and closer to the End. For it is possible, on a purely
conceptual basis, to make a few conjectures about how the End
will take form at the junction of a whole series of moral,
political, and natural disasters. Second, I will directly confront
the thesis that we must live in an atmosphere of preemptive
guilt and anxiety in order to face the challenge of collectively
opposing the catastrophic course of events in which we are
caught. On the contrary, I will defend two ideas: 1) that we are
fully capable to think about our own extinction without
necessarily panicking at the ethical level, and 2) that living the
Times of the End may even empower us with a much better
version of what is morally good.

For, I do not think that we should worry about the End as such.
Were it to come, in a thousand years or in a couple of centuries,
by definition, most of the critical issues raised by this new dry
and flat apocalypse (an Apocalypse without Kingdom) would
have already been solved: there would be very few survivors,
and they would be left with very few to save. We should, then,
focus on the period before the one starting just now, and
extending to this crucial point in future history at which a more
self-conscious mankind will see in full light when and how it will
end, as clear as a fixed day on a timetable. For, in this period,
worries about the End will increasingly confer an extraordinary
intensity to the last men' s choices (the End itself being not a
choice, but the end of choice). A highly plausible option is the
following: we will witness an unbounded, a wild unleashing of

egoism and irrationality. Hungry and scared people, probably

crushed by the unfair and dysfunctional political institutions
born out of shortage and insecurity, will cling to their miserable
lives, and start to kill each others en masse to tentatively
secure the last available life-supporting systems of our planet,
or for the mere semblance of a protracted survival, and, finally,
for nothing. I regard this as a credible scenario because I do
not make any conjecture about what we will do tomorrow
morning, but I only generalize from what we are
observing right now to what will constitute tomorrow morning
the basis for all possible actions. The Times of the End start
today, not tomorrow (actually, they may even have started since
Hiroshima and Nagasaki). And what we see now does not give
us a lot of reasons for hope in the future behavior of mankind.

But what a modern reader of Sade could learn from the French
moralist is that people would not be long to realize that the
impending end of everything of value (life, moral virtues, love,
meaningful endeavors, etc.) can become, by a bizarre twist, the
last form of enjoyment available to us. Instead of passively
witnessing the disappearance of all what is good, generation
after generation, and then, individuals after individuals, why
not turn this sad process into a lustful, pervert, and ultimate
frenzy of self-destruction? Why not turn all that will prove to be
only worse and worse into radiant Evil? The closer the End, the
more passionate humanity would resort to the most atrocious,
the most excessive, the most demented ways to secure for the
last Sad Few the very last means to last even a few more
years... of vicious (self-)destruction. A Sadean moralist would
hold that the gist and the glamour of the Times of the End will
certainly not consist in cautiously securing the means of a
delayed ending, but in the lust attached to stealing them, and to
murder their rightful owners. Moral vices, cruelty ranking first,
and abuse would no longer be the mere side-effects of universal
6

despair. For the survivors, they would be the prime movers of

the experience of being (still) alive. It follows, in my thought
experiment, that as we would come closer to the End, the idea
of humanity as a whole would finally crumble. People will see
no other death than their own individual death. Hence, people
will not see any other suicide than their own private
termination, contradicting in a final acting out Jonas' s thesis on
the impossible suicide of mankind. For, as life would lose all
interest (out of sadistically exacting what will be left to exact
from our fellow survivors), who will attach a high price to one' s
existence? Consequently, not only Evil would finally self-cancel,
for lack of anyone able to morally evaluate anything after
Doomsday, but in this process of self-cancellation, all the
rational and conscious individuals to whom humanity would
little by little boil down would prove suicidal.

So be afraid of the Times before the End of Times. Be very

afraid. Not because of the abstract and supposedly unbearable
idea of mankind' s twilight, but because of the concrete and
terrible events which might drive and even precipitate it in a
spiraling intensification of Evil. And because the driving force,
ethically speaking, of this process of self-destruction, may be, at
least in part, the very certainty attached to the ineluctability of
the End.

What does this mean? One disturbing thing, to start with: as I

said above, this sinister process might have already begun. We
live this period of time in between the moment people start to
realize that they are heading to the abolition of every single
thing of value, and the moment at which the date for the Last
Day will be set once and for all. Hence, instead of complaining
about the insensitivity of our contemporaries (they know, but
they do not feel anxious the way they should), why not suspect,

at least in many of them, a totally different perspective: a still

unconscious, or, rather, a non-explicit leaning towards the sort
of Evil I was alluding to? One funny anecdote: I read that in the
United States, you can now buy a device, to be fixed on your
exhaust pipe, which actually increases the quantity of toxic
smoke you release in the atmosphere. So, in some Southern
states, a handful of truck drivers mocking climate change as a
liberal hoax, proclaim their inalienable right to live their lives
the way they do, and will do forever. More seriously, the utter
ferocity with which growing social and economic inequalities of
the most scandalous proportions are being sheltered from any
attempt to correct them, even minimally, speaks for itself. And
when we speak of elites in denial, when it comes to climate
change, why don' t we speak, at least for the best informed, not
of denial, not of self-intoxication with pseudo-science, but of
plain, conscious, and deliberate lies? We underestimate
the rational interests many people do have in aggravating the
social, political, and environmental imbalance, if the End is a
settled (and impending) fact.

The key reason why the Jaspers-Anders-Jonas' s view of a

morally commendable anxiety about mankind' s end is, I think,
utter nonsense, is that they do not take into account that the
very same assumption brought forth by the heuristics of fear
(the End nears, and it is real) will also feed precisely the selfdestructive process it is meant to fend off. So, in my critique of
them, I do not stand with those who contend that the way
Jaspers, Anders, and Jonas praise anxiety would rather stifle
our intentions to counteract the current trends of mankind
towards self-destruction. Jonas probably comes clean of this
accusation, for he always drew a clear distinction between
pathological anxiety and responsible anxiety (though he hardly
provides us with a criterion). Rather, I underscore that Evil is
intrinsically part of human nature, and as Sade pointed out in

materialistic and atheist terms, and with a deep moral

understanding of what modern individualism implies, the less
we worry about what comes after us, the more we are inclined
to take chances, and to indulge in our most dangerous and
lustful passions . Only substitute Sade' s refutation of the
Afterlife with our very realistic prospect of an Apocalypse
without Kingdom, and his 18th century moral vision of the
egoism of the individuals by the full force of what neoliberal
societies can actually bring about. So, intensifying anxiety, la
Jaspers, or trusting the cathartic powers of the heuristic of
fears, la Jonas, can always backfire. To make this clearer, let
me draw a parallel with Lacan' s disturbing comment on a
famous moral vignette by Kant . Kant compares two cases: one
in which a lecherous man is offered the opportunity to spend a
night with the object of his lust, but at the price to be hanged
the next morning, and the other, in which the same man is
threatened with the gallows if he does not give false testimony
against some enemy of his Prince. For Kant, in the first case,
nobody doubts that the man will recoil, by contrast with the
second case, in which the same man will confess that he should,
at least, be able to face the possibility of his own death, even
though he lacks the courage to say no to the Prince. But Lacan
laughs: if spending the night with the object of his lust means to
be allowed to do to her all what he wishes for instance,
raping her in a gruesome way, and then, slowly cutting her into
pieces , who can be so sure that the certainty of his death will
prevent the lecherous man to act accordingly? Let us go
further: the certainty of his death may paradoxically induce him
to seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to unleash a fullfledged perversion. All the more for mankind; especially if
mankind boils down to the very last individuals (us?) and if they
are all objectively aware that their death is scheduled for
tomorrow morning.
7

Hence, if I am not mistaken, the Jaspers-Anders-Jonas' s

contention that we should live in a kind of preemptive guilt, in
order to prevent the apocalypse which looms, appears not only
as sad and depressing (who wants of a life of perhaps useless
anxiety, especially if these days are the last ones to be lived on
Earth by sensible beings?), but even as dangerous and
counterproductive. What we need is not guilt, or anxiety, or
collective responsibility, but, rather, not to feel intimidated by
all the actions to be undertaken, and the clear-sightedness to
confront the hidden or implicit ways of Evil at work (for not
only the good people know of the End, but the bad as well, who
draw opposite consequences from the same premiss). I agree,
Jonas' s anxiety, on classical Heideggerian lines, mediates all
self-appropriation, all resoluteness, and brings about the
effective freedom to act in crucial circumstances. So, it may
generate something like courage and lucidity as its by-products.
But it is much too ambiguous for the intended purpose, for it
fails to capture what I would qualify, in defiant terms, as the
emancipating power of the Times of the End.

Here, I would like to open up scope for a parallel inquiry.

Because the radical possibility of Evil has not properly been
taken into account (including its unthinkable or yet to be
discovered forms), the necessary parallel reform of what we
deem good and valuable is still pending. But in the following
account, what does not differ so much from the Jaspers-AndersJonas' s vision, is the idea that Doomsday looms. We should not
think of it as a remote event. On the contrary, we ought to
interpret the present manifestations of Evil (and especially
those linked to silent, slow, and invisible catastrophes) as the
immediate forerunners of the End: there is a causal link
between now and tomorrow in the spiraling of disasters which
turns the ethical postulate of Jonas (for it verges, sometimes, on

the thought experiment, fictionalized for salvation purpose) into

an ever-nearing actual apocalypse.

What do I mean; then, when speaking of the emancipating

power of the Times of the End? Exactly the same as what the
evildoers (who are to multiply as the End nears) mean when
they see their own lives (and their fellow survivors' lives) as
being without a day after, and, consequently, when, they feel
free to enact the worst possible deeds. I even suspect that it
is unwise to try to circumvent their ethical stance. The freedom
to do evil, in the Times of the End, must rest on the same
grounds as the freedom to do good. True, all the good expected
from the postulate at the heart of the heuristics of fear paves
the way for a contrary Evil. For, some will say, it is already too
late, and it has maybe always been too late to try to salvage
anything meaningful. In any case, why take the pain of a
probably useless good and go after the long shot? But the
certainty of the End also allows for a symmetric logical
conversion (from modus ponens to modus tollens, without
delving here into the technicalities). For at any given moment of
choice (bad vs good), moral rational agents can see that
choosing the path of evil is also doomed to fail to secure more
long-term security for them as individuals, or to definitely put
off the End for all. Hence, choosing the evil path is but
an understandable vital reaction to hopelessness (a way of
exacting a form of excitation from despair). It is not rational per
se. The very same agent might just as well reason that he or she
has never been so free to be absolutely good, for any motive
like self-interest, or the advantages drawn from his or her
egoism, will likely bring nothing to him tomorrow. But this
better moral agent faces two challenges. First, he or she must
be able to confront the End of Times exactly in the same terms
as the evildoers to come (if they are not already at work!): as a
settled fact. Being only anxious about its imminent advent in

the (indirect) hope that it will not happen is not enough. Thus,
against Jonas, the better agent must not recoil from thinking
the suicide of mankind as a tragedy in progress, so to speak.
Second, this agent will have to find the ways and means to
obtain a form of both moral and affective satisfaction in
choosing the path of good, even though it will leave no trace to
remember, nor set any example for future generations.

In the final phase of this essay, I will insist, first, on the fact
that, notwithstanding what apocalyptic philosophers have
repeatedly stated, we are perfectly able to face the eventuality
of our collective extinction (as the whole of mankind) without
any moral panic that is, without necessarily losing our
dignity, or forfeiting our reason, even though it is obviously a
deeply emotional issue.

What we ought to learn to live with, I suggest, is the idea of a

good (life) with no tomorrow. It differs from living like there
is no tomorrow, for the latter locution usually suggests
hopelessness; it anticipates a future, and inescapable
conviction, so that we only ought to take advantage of the
moment before the hammer drops. But, at the End, the hammer
will drop on the hammer as well. The former idea of a good
(life) with no tomorrow calls, on the contrary, for a reappraisal
of what it means to lose everything of value. But it so happens
that we did face, in the long course of human history, times in
which the issue of losing all what was worth living (or a moral
symbol of it) materialized in a most concrete form. Maybe we
should draw a lesson from these moments. In a letter to Carl
von Gersdorff of June 21st, 1871, Nietzsche describes the deep
moral impact the rumor that the Louvre in Paris had been set
ablaze by the communist revolution had upon him . Not only
unique works of art, but entire periods of the cultural history of
9

mankind would have been lost. The run-of-the-mill reading of

Nietzsche' s letter links it to the melancholy feeling which was
his dominant mood at the times, the Autumn of culture
extending its shadows all over modern civilization, even if the
Louvre had actually not burnt. But a less known French reader
of Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski, offers a different account, more
in line with Nietzsche' s philosophy . Klossowski ventures to say
that the horror and gloom felt at the event could only be one
dimension of Nietzsche' s reaction. Some other passages tend
to show that, as terrible as it could have been, the burning of
the Louvre (and other similar catastrophes) should be regarded
as tragic opportunities to open up new possibilities of creation,
and for the affirmation of life. This Nietzschean detour helps us
to better characterize what we fear so much to lose, at the End:
not exactly the ultimate meaning attached to the existence of
mankind, but its achievements as objectified as a treasure trove
of meaningful works of the past, towards which we should
display a form of burdensome and meritorious faithfulness.
losing them would be losing the best of past men, it would make
their endeavors and their accomplishments null and void. By
contrast, what we do not lose, at any point, is our ability to
reaffirm the power of creative life, against our memory, so to
speak, that is, against the moral prison of our veneration for the
past, against any fantasized trustworthiness towards our elders.
10

Hence my proposal: once cured of our imaginary and fetishist

objectification of the ultimate meaning of humanity through its
works of arts (and, by extension, through all its spiritual
achievements), we would only retain this creative power. And,
by definition, this power is no smaller today that it was
yesterday, or that it could be tomorrow. It expresses itself
throughout a variety of forms, some already definitely
forgotten, some others not yet conceived of by even the most
perspicuous minds, to the point that we could actually face the

entire destruction of the Louvre, and, in our grief, not despair

of what we or the next generations could and will paint. Should
we fail to address this challenge, the blame would fall solely
upon us (or upon our children), and we would deserve our
nothingness. But, once again, would our future be limited,
would there be only a few generations of artists or thinkers to
come after us, this both vivid and vital experience of exerting
all our creative potentialities would not be curtailed. This
Nietzschean detour lifts, methinks, a good part of the weight on
our shoulders. We are not confined, when it comes to the last
things, to a narrow mentality of museum keepers. We are not in
essence the guardians of the memories of all those, whose life
preceded ours; we are not bound, either, to push further on
their endeavors. A truly Nietzschean view of this illusion would
even suggest that, on the contrary, only those whose life is
already poor in meaning dream to personify for the next
generations those who will have been their indispensable
elders, their models, or, at least, their counter-models. They
project or, rather, evacuate in the future the onus of making
sense of their senseless existence of today, because they lack
the strength either to make it meaningful, or to silently exit the
stage. And to keep the illusion alive, they behave as if, to them,
the whole of human past is meaningful.

Such a view, which only requires to credit the better people of

tomorrow of at least the same chance for grandeur as the
evildoers, entails a major revision of our everyday attitudes. If
we are actually living Man' s twilight, it means, among other
things, that we should take very seriously the idea that we do
not create anymore anything for our posterity. We ought to find
our satisfaction in what we do per se. What it will become later
on is contingent, but contingent in a way it has never been for
the people who lived before us (who were not acting in the
shadow of their absolute abolition). Devising all human projects

with no tomorrow (without the forlorn prospect of eternity)

would deeply affect us, and, most probably, would call for a
complete reconsideration of what it means to be an artist, a
political leader, a thinker, a father (a mother), etc., or anyone
whose meaningful actions stretch beyond one' s lifespan. The
issue of begetting children is crucial, and all modern
apocalyptic prophets resort to it to maximize our feeling of
responsibility. It is striking that none of them ever considered
that we do not make children with the idea that, some day, they
will evaluate our actions. We make them because it is (usually)
part of a pleasurable activity, we raise them because we like
interacting with them, and we hope that it will be just the same
for them (to the point that would our children ever behave as
the moral censors of what we did in bringing them into the
world, we would have a reasonable ground to say that they miss
the whole point in relation to their own children, or that
something essential is missing in the transmission between
generations). Our responsibility towards future generations,
this apocalyptic clich, detached from these basic
considerations, is but a scarecrow. Not only do we invent out of
thin air a collective of future moral partners which are bound to
inherit our narrow mindedness of museum keepers, but we
impose upon their shoulders (happily, only as a figment of our
imagination!) the ethical burden to live and feel just the way we
did, and not otherwise. Once again, the moral shift I regard as
essential to a reform of what we deem morally good requires us
to detach ourselves from any objectification or, rather,
fetishization of what we inherited from the past. It certainly
implies a moral upheaval, in which the joy of creation (to take it
as a paradigm of all meaningful activity) consists more in the
act and its inner significance than in the resulting work and in
its outer value. Let me make, en passant, a connection with
Freud. In a footnote of the Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, Freud says that the ancient were more prone than us
to value the drives (the sexual impulses per se), whereas we,
the modern, value the object, and we often falter under the

weight of the many idealizations we attach to it . We might

rediscover how wise the attitude of the antiquity was.
11

My last words will try to call your attention on three paradoxes.

The first is the following: this Nietzschean-Freudian
contestation of the privilege of anxiety as the one and only
commendable emotion for us, who are living the Times of the
End, could be shared by all evildoers, present or to come.
Sexual and aggressive impulses are exactly what they rely upon
in their passionate reclaiming of the last means to enjoy life as
Doomsday nears. But it is precisely what I intended. For it
means that whatever will come, the last people on Earth will
not necessarily envision the past history of humanity as a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.
Even their very last actions could be meaningful to them,
performed with joy and serenity, as they would be
increasingly freed of any expectation or judgment from a nonexistent posterity. Thus the fight between good and evil will not,
either, necessarily end up with the triumph of Evil. Hence the
second paradox: the less we are dependent on the imaginary
preservation of the human project as a whole, in the JaspersAnders-Jonas' s vein, the less we are sensitive to moral bullying.
I am fully aware of the prophetic grandiosity of such
pronouncement, but if the End nears, the meaning we can
confer to its advent will remain the one of a constant struggle
between life-asserting and death-asserting tendencies. The
issue is not already settled whether we will have to feel
shameful about the End that we will make for ourselves.
Furthermore, by a bizarre twist, the energy to cope with the
Evil which comes (an Evil which Sade himself could not have
anticipated in his wildest fantasies) may spring from a selfconscious detachment from all kind of eschatological fear. As if,
as the End nears, the worst danger for mankind would be its
inability to lose everything. In a sense, it is only by facing what

the evildoers will do (or already do) with the idea that there is
no meaningful future, that we may turn the tables, and give
another interpretation of what is really good (in a good with no
tomorrow). The third and last paradox is a bullet against
philosophers which might ricochet and wound me as well. It is a
plea for ordinary people, or, rather, a plea for a form of
rationality which may well work undetected under the cloak of
the so-called moral insensitivity or epistemic idiocy of our
contemporaries. Actually, it seems there two options, and, of
course, they are not mutually exclusive. Either a good number
of our contemporaries are (unconscious, or self-conscious and
hidden) evildoers, well aware of our future fate, and taking
advantage as long as they still can of a situation not yet so
disastrous at the expense of the generations to come.
Unfortunately, I think that we should worry very much about
this possibility, because, if the End is both imminent and
certain, as I hold it to be, it may lead to radically new excesses,
leaving far behind us the most outrageous manifestations of
human Evil that we have long witnessed. Or, at the other end of
a spectrum where shades likely blend smoothly into each
others, our contemporaries are people who do not see why they
should embrace for their own sake any apocalyptic anxiety, but,
rather, they just focus on life-asserting behaviors without
worrying about the day after. It might be, then, that ordinary
folk may know best; they act in a very reasonable way, to the
extent that it should bring about a serious reconsideration of
what we deem good, in the Times of the End. And philosophers,
instead of banging their heads against the non-existent
conundrum of common people' s seeming indifference to
eschatological stakes, would rather learn from them.

1K. Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man, The University of Chicago Press,
1963, being the English trans. of Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen.
Politische Bewusstsein in unserer Zeit; Piper Verlag, Mnchen, 1956; G.
Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenende: Gedanken ber die atomare Situation, Beck
Verlag, Mnchen, 1972; H. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility. In search of an

Ethics for the Technological Age, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, being the
English trans. of Die Prinzip Veranwortung: Versuch einer Ethik fr die
technologische Zivilisation, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972.
2In the famous last page of the Naked Man (1971, English transl. by J. and D.
Weightman, 1981, p.693), C. Lvi-Strauss reminds us that our species, and our
planet, and the solar system, and our galaxy, are all to disappear in the future,
leaving nothing behind to remember, and to nobody. But I am not speaking of
stellar eons, which are, by definition, impervious to the human quest for its own
meaning.
3J. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, and The Abolition (First edited by Knopf, 1982 and
1984), Stanford University Press, 2000.
4For a good reason, by itself, cannot entail (in the sense of trigger) any action. No
action will ever follow from the premises of a practical syllogism the way a logical
conclusion follows from the premises of a theoretical one.
5We may be witnessing a conceptual shift, in this regard. In the 2000s, people were
deemed unconscious about the actual possibility of a catastrophic termination of
humanity. They were regarded as non-believers, or not properly informed.
Nowadays, the problem seems rather that we do know, but we do nothing because
we are not anxious about what is going on the way we should. We are no longer
unconscious, we are insensitive.
6Think, for instance, of the Nazis, well aware that the war was lost (with all its
foreseeable consequences for the German people and its dignitaries), and, however,
stopping or diverting the trains headed to the frontline loaded with ammunitions in
order to let the convoys of Hungarian Jews reach Auschwitz in time.
7There is irony, here, when one thinks that Jonas was a scholar well versed in
gnosticism. One of the oddest (though marginal) expressions of this philosophy is
that men, if the prophecy of Apocalypse is true, should not refrain from their evil
deeds. On the contrary, the worse they sin, the quicker the End of Times, and the
advent of the Kingdom. Of course, sinners would be damned. But all the others
would enjoy a prompt salvation. Now, if we are heading towards an Apocalypse
without Kingdom, what are we at risk to lose, if we sin without restraint?
8Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, Abbott' s
translation, Longmans, Green and Co, London, 1898, p.118.
9In Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, G. Colli & M. Montinari (eds.),
De Gruyter, Mnchen-Berlin-New York, 1975, vol. II, 1, p. 204.
10P. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, English transl. by D.W.Smith, The
University of Chicago Press, 1997.
11The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no
doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself,
whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were
prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the
instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.
S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE VII, p.1476.