With the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States on January 20, we are entering a period of radical uncertainty even greater than we’ve experienced in recent years. We thought we lived in an uncertain world? We haven’t seen anything yet. Accepting this uncertainty means accepting a kind of vertigo, a sense of a world out of balance. For the philosopher André Glucksmann, accepting the vertigo of renouncing certainties is a source of strength. Vertigo is a form of liberation that allows us to think clearly and is a lever for creativity and transformation. But there’s no guarantee that we’ll have this power.
In La Force du vertige (the force of vertigo), published in 1983, André Glucksmann explores vertigo as a powerful metaphor for the present. Vertigo is a physical sensation that here becomes a philosophical and political concept. It expresses the sensation of a spinning world where there are no absolutes or landmarks, and embraces the uncertainty, fear, and existential doubt that characterize our times.
Glucksmann writes against the tense geopolitical backdrop of the 1980s. The deployment of American nuclear missiles in Europe in response to Soviet SS-20s aroused strong pacifist opposition, especially in Germany. The book is a scathing indictment of this opposition, which he denounces as a form of intellectual and moral paralysis in the face of the nuclear threat.
According to Glucksmann, the atomic bomb provides one of the most striking illustrations of contemporary vertigo. Its invention establishes a form of terror through uncertainty. Unlike the wars of the past, which were based on rational strategies and defined objectives (at least in theory), nuclear weapons make the gamble of a military adventure uncertain. The uncertainty is strategic, of course, since nuclear deterrence is based on a precarious equilibrium in which the use of force is paradoxically unthinkable and the conditions for the use of the bomb are always uncertain, but it is above all psychological: the mere existence of nuclear weapons plunges humanity into a state of permanent fear, hovering on the brink of total self-destruction, yet having to go on with its daily life. If uncertainty has always been a component of war, with the atomic bomb it also becomes a component of peace. It becomes dizzying because it affects not only the outcome of conflicts, but the very existence of humanity. The question can no longer be avoided, nor can it be dealt with by rational historical schemes of thought.
The dizziness arises above all from the collapse of the great ideologies of the twentieth century, especially communism and fascism. These doctrines, whose certainties claimed to offer a coherent vision of the world and a direction to follow, turned out to be murderous dead ends built on lies. Their disappearance leaves a void: a society deprived of fixed points of reference, oscillating between disorientation and loss of meaning. Faced with this emptiness, nihilism seems to be the only option left. This is what pacifists express when they proclaim “better red than dead”: there is no longer any idea or value worth defending beyond life itself, reduced to its biological dimension. Let us live, the rest is irrelevant.
Vertigo: between fear and freedom
But while vertigo can be a source of anxiety, it can also be a form of joyful liberation. In the absence of absolute certainties, modern man is confronted with his own responsibility. He must make choices with no guarantee of their correctness, and take responsibility for his decisions in a world where the old certainties have collapsed. Freedom is not without dizziness, and that’s why it’s not comfortable. It comes with a constant need to redefine one’s values and face the complexity of reality. This acceptance of vertigo is illustrated by an episode in the prologue to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Zarathustra arrives in a nearby town where a crowd has gathered around a tightrope walker. The tightrope walker falls, and Zarathustra pays tribute to him: “You’ve made danger your profession, there’s nothing despicable about that…”. Nietzsche,” Glucksmann concludes, “prophesies that nihilism means less the death of God than the disappearance of classical man and his ability to grapple with the abyss. Give us certainties, any certainties, we’re tired.
Glucksmann rejects this temptation as well as the temptation to retreat into comforting illusions. They are two sides of the same coin. On the contrary, vertigo is an invitation to clarity: like the tightrope walker, we must think without a net, accepting uncertainty as a driving force for critical reflection and intellectual innovation. Vertigo, then, isn’t just an existential crisis; it’s also the intellectual and moral challenge that Montaigne celebrated. It invites us to emerge from the “cave of good feelings” and to move beyond ideological simplifications to embrace the complexity of the contemporary world. It is a form of liberation, but it is also a source of opportunity and a potential lever for creativity and social transformation. After all, the source of all entrepreneurial change is complexity and uncertainty. A certain world would be a dead star.
But given the shocks we are experiencing, the daily horror of current events, and the sometimes literally insane developments we are witnessing, it is not certain that nihilism and comforting illusions are behind us. On the contrary, and Glucksmann’s appeal may well remain wishful thinking, our times seem to be a curious mixture of retreat (who doesn’t have a friend who’s building a self-contained house in the country, complete with solar panels and chicken farms) and the sharpening of political divisions, with a desperate search for new certainties, however absurd, and the return of ideologies we mistakenly thought had disappeared.
The temptation
The temptation is great. We may be incapable of joyfully accepting the dizzying uncertainty of our times and welcoming with relief, however cowardly, the first adventurer who can convince us that his certainties are the right ones – this time, I promise. It’s up to us to resist.
🇫🇷 A version in French of this article is available here.
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