Alice Koubová: Our desire for happiness leads to unhappiness
Kapitál
Resilience can be a path to a free and livable life, but also a tool for self-discipline and preserving the status quo. Where does individual adaptation end and society’s, institutions’ and policymakers’ responsibility for the conditions in which we can continue to live and act begin?
At the beginning of the book Resilient Society: Between Powerlessness and Tyranny (2023), you defined resilience as the ability to cope with disruption, adapt and restore functioning, or possibly transform into a new stable state. Its essence is to actively participate in events that we do not fully control and to seek within them possibilities for meaningful action and development. Resilience is a peculiar and ambivalent concept. Could you explain it in greater detail?
Resilience is a concept that we currently encounter in research, politics and public administration, as well as in everyday language. In research, resilience emerged as a neologism after the Second World War in psychology, in the 1970s in ecology, and only in the twenty-first century in the social sciences and, for example, democratic theory. What is philosophically interesting about it is that, as a neologism, it is intended to name a reality that cannot be captured by other concepts, one that had until then been invisible to our conceptual language. Psychologists observed that similarly intense traumatic experiences have very different effects on people in terms of the possibilities of their further development in life, and that there is no deterministic relationship between an impulse and its manifestation in human life. Ecologists observed that ecosystems do not exist only in a single state of equilibrium, but are capable, under the influence of various stressors, of changing their states within the so-called adaptive cycle while preserving their dynamic nature. Unlike materials engineering, which understands the resilience of materials as the ability to return to their original state after the influence of stress, in living systems the issue is to examine what helps them develop, continue their development in life or return to development. This way of posing the question had a major influence on psychology and ecology, and I want to show that it can potentially contribute to transforming the philosophical conception of life, the human subject as a living being, and the politics of life.
Why has resilience also become such an important concept in politics and public administration?
In politics and public administration, it experienced its boom much later, evidently in connection with the fact that the previously prevailing discourse of permanent growth and risk reduction ceased to be convincing in the face of the crises into which we had entered. If we are to govern at a time when certainties, the intelligibility of the world and our own self-understanding are being shaken, we need to be able to pass through this crisis.
What does the widespread use of this concept in the public sphere tell us about our shared experience?
As regards resilience in everyday use in the public sphere, it is useful to understand it as a symptom, a certain linguistic reflection of a shared experience that encompasses our increasingly immediate experience of vulnerability, perhaps a feeling of threat, the non-obviousness of security and growing pain – and at the same time a certain form of unwillingness simply to succumb to powerlessness and reactive fear, a search for how to respond to such a situation, and a readiness to change through difficult situations. In all three of these areas – in research and philosophy, in governance and politics, and in everyday language – resilience can function as a concept that enriches our understanding, changes the perspective from which we think, and opens up our possibilities for political, civic and personal action, or as a concept that helps us secure comfortable grant funding in a cynically conceived academic operation, creates a rhetorical smokescreen for the absence of supportive public policies, or functions as a platitude and a tool of self-discipline. It is therefore necessary to examine this concept and its use critically.
What does that mean?
First of all, it means that we need to avoid the extremely boring rhetorical struggle over who is for resilience and who is against it. This is not a distinction that generates any knowledge. Secondly, it is necessary to perceive the ambivalence of resilience as its philosophical richness. Unambiguous concepts are philosophically empty. Examining what new conception of the human being in the world resilience reveals must go hand in hand with examining when a reversal occurs in its thinking, when it begins to be an instrument of centripetal thinking that closes discussion in favour of asserting some form of power. And thirdly, it is necessary to reject the idea that words which are currently widespread and experiencing some kind of resonance in society should be philosophically shunned. The philosophical need always to think in an unusual way and against everyone is connected with the prejudice that if the human majority agrees on something, it must surely be degraded and stereotypical. This is a philosophical mannerism and an internal danger of philosophy. If many people think and talk about a subject, it makes sense to ask why this is happening and what experience provoked such resonance. Philosophy can help slow down the circulation of this word, devote the missing analysis to it, disentangle its entangled interpretations and areas of use. In doing so, it will of course risk more than when contemplating the clearing of being. But it may happen that it reveals a philosophically relevant topic.
Critics of the concept of resilience point out that an emphasis on the ability to cope with crises may push into the background the question of why crises arise and how to eliminate their causes. Instead of changing social conditions, people are expected to become more resilient, flexible and adaptable. Is this concept therefore part of “neoliberal language”? How do you address this criticism?
I think the criticism is justified, and I do not set myself the task of coming to terms with it. My effort is not aimed at defending resilience as a whole, but at its critical reflection. In this particular case, I generally try to show that the criticism is not directed at how resilience is considered within long-term scientific research, that is, research which does not seek merely to exploit the concept through projects. In psychology, a crucial part of the topic of resilience is reflection on the social environment, its normativity, an assessment of inequality in the distribution of uncertainty, and the resources a person receives so that they can develop their life or return to the development of life after experiencing some kind of shock that interrupted the possibilities of development. After the concept of resilience was introduced, psychology transformed into social and political psychology, as shown by the books of Michael Ungar, Ann Masten, George Bonanno, Boris Cyrulnik and others. At the same time, however, these studies show that a person is not determined by their environment, that they are not merely an individual function of the system, but can also transform the system within lived relationships, resources and support, in accordance with the experience they have undergone. This is shown, for example, by the book by Peter Hall and Michèle Lamont, Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era.
How does this relationship between resilience and transforming the conditions of life manifest itself in ecology, especially in the context of the Anthropocene?
In ecology, we can observe a very similar development. After a certain phase of research, it became clear that the resilience of ecological systems cannot be assessed without including the element of human action. Every ecological system is in fact a socio-ecological system, and in the Anthropocene the component of human influence on ecosystems is practically central. Therefore, the original theory of systems, in which resilience had the role of a descriptive variable describing the adaptive cycle of an ecosystem, is transformed into a socio-ecological theory in which resilience becomes a normative concept, drawing attention primarily and unambiguously to social responsibility for dealing with nature. Social ecology therefore asks what new public policies we need, how we need to change the governance of socio-ecological systems, and what values we need to reassess if we do not want our activity ultimately to exceed all the limits of the planetary ecosystem that guarantee that life on planet Earth will remain habitable for us as human beings.
How, then, can we distinguish the emancipatory potential of resilience from its ideological abuse?
The criticism of using resilience as a concept that shifts responsibility for systemic failures onto individuals is therefore a criticism of various ideological uses and misuses of this concept for the purpose of preserving the political or social status quo. But resilience itself is not to blame for this. It is a justified criticism of, say, business prescriptions in companies (workshops on building organisational resilience), the rhetoric of political leaders (“Citizens of Nice, show your resilience!”, “New Orleans has always been resilient!”), or popular self-improvement books (Discover Your Inner Strength and Resilience!; Be Resilient, Be Yourself!; Resilience: 10 Steps to a Happy Life; The Resilient Person: 12 Principles of a Positive Mindset and Inner Strength). None of this is promoted by resilience research. If, therefore, we devote all our ingenuity to getting rid of the concept of resilience, then together with these appropriations we also get rid of the results of decades of research that has an immensely subversive potential towards neoliberal ideology, the normativity of late modernity, and the rhetoric of individual strength. Resilience is not individual strength. If it were individual strength, we could speak of individual strength and would not need to introduce the new word resilience. Likewise, resilience is neither resistance nor resignation. It opens up a new paradigm that offers a way of bearing the ambivalence of life: we are vulnerable and at the same time not powerless. We are capable of seeing the consequences of our mistakes and do not project them outside ourselves in order to take revenge on others for our mistakes, because we are prepared to acknowledge our own mistakes and change ourselves. We live in a non-ideal society, but this does not prevent us from taking meaningful steps within it. We recognise that the people around us are absolutely crucial to our habitable lives and that supporting solidarity and basic social security for everyone is neither a right-wing nor a left-wing ideology – it is the ontology of life. If, therefore, we reject “resilience” as a whole because of the ways in which some actors deal with it, we paradoxically contribute to maintaining business as usual. We do what those who are well aware that resilience is a subversive concept want us to do, and who want either to destroy the thinking of resilience or appropriate it. When we throw resilience in the bin, we play into their hands and still feel like triumphant critical thinkers.
In your study Which Resilience? Thinking Democratic Subjectivity in the Polycrisis, published in the journal Filozofia, you examine what form the resilience of democracy should take in order to support people’s free and dignified lives, linking political philosophy with psychoanalytic theories of (relational) subjectivity and resilience research. Can democracy be institutionally stable and yet create conditions that weaken people’s ability to live freely and act politically?
In resilience theory, the primary issue is not the preservation of stability or the status quo. Therefore, democratic resilience is not defined by stable democratic institutions either. As I show in the book Philosophy of a Habitable Life, the central concept used by psychology and ecology in connection with resilience is a habitable life.
What does “a habitable life” mean?
The ontology of life is development in life, that is, the possibility of developing over time and of understanding this development as one’s own development, rather than as determinism in which a person plays the role of an instrument, an object, an alienated entity. Life is habitable if an individual, a social ecosystem or a society experience themselves as having a future to which they are related, and as being able to respond to events that appear in their history and, through this response, continue to live as their own development in time. Resilience is therefore a processual concept: it enables a person to live life as an open development of themselves, within the systems in which they are embedded, and thus at different levels: as an individual, as a community and as a participant in an ecosystem.
What follows for democratic institutions from this understanding of resilience?
If democratic theory speaks of the resilience of democracy, it must include this dimension of life in its definition and must not, by some specific bypass, link itself to the old ecological theory of systems, which did not consider human life and the way human beings govern in detail. Democratic resilience therefore expresses whether citizens in a given political system are capable of living habitable lives, developing their lives and restoring their development in life after shocks with the support of the social environment, public policies and institutional supports. Democratic institutions are therefore not strongest when they are stable, but when they respond to new problems by transforming themselves in favour of securing a habitable life for all citizens. At the same time, this characteristic is aspirational, meaning that there is no democracy in the world in which institutional violence against certain social groups does not occur, along with their actual experience that the life they live is not worth living. Democracy is a processual system characterised, in the words of Frédéric Worms, David Runciman and Michael Ignatieff, by opposing internal violence, violence that people inflict on one another, society inflicts on people, or institutions inflict on people; its only purpose lies in permanent self-correction, conflict and the democratisation of democracy. It is in this processuality and self-suspicion, rather than in moral superiority, that it differs from a stable autocracy, which instead legitimises internal violence.
How do you view the concept of the Anthropocene from your philosophical perspective? Is the concept of resilience an adequate response to the challenges, threats and risks that this concept brings?
During the Holocene, the Earth’s planetary system remained within one area of equilibrium (Planet Earth Holocene Basin), while the resilience of the system in this state was sufficient to ensure that various types of crises and internal disruptions did not lead to a tipping point and the transition of the entire system into a new regime. With the advent of the Anthropocene, however, this very character of the global ecosystem is changing. The manner and extent to which humanity participates in the dynamics of socio-ecological systems are continually reducing the resilience of the planetary system. They are bringing us closer to tipping points. In 2009, the Swedish scientist and director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre Johan Rockström and a group of other scientists described these tipping points as a set of nine planetary boundaries (planetary boundaries). Planetary boundaries delineate a safe space for the life of countless biological species, including humans. Once they are crossed, the entire planetary ecosystem will irreversibly shift into a different regime, one that will certainly exclude human life from the web of life.
What role does resilience play in these considerations?
Resilience plays an absolutely central role in the considerations of these scientists. They show that what deserves strengthening and support is clearly not some individual resilience of human beings in the face of the climate crisis, but rather the resilience of the socio-ecological system, ultimately the resilience of the global system of planet Earth, whose dynamics human beings participate in as immensely influential and evidently (self-)destructive actors. This is not about protecting nature while preserving our own lifestyle by increasing “personal resilience” to climate change, while giving up on changing it. It is about transforming the governance of social relations, institutions, rights and the sharing of knowledge about the world, which will secondarily support the resilience of socio-ecological systems in various states of socio-ecological death in life. It turns out that accepting precisely this fact is socially, cognitively and paradigmatically the most difficult. We are not innocent in this. We must admit that we need to change our behaviour, our idea of success and our desire for peace and quiet.
In your book of interviews entitled The Strength of Resilience (2026), in a polemic with the German feminist author Eva von Redecker, you suggest that modern capitalism “kills” or “deadens” life on the planet in the name of “development” and “progress”. Justin McBrien argues similarly, writing about our era as the “Necrocene”, that is, the “age of death” or “age of extinction”. According to him, capitalist accumulation creates wealth through the destruction of life and the conditions for its reproduction.
Yes, in my view, resilience research at various levels draws attention to what I call a double bind, that is, a situation in which, in the name of continuing their existence, people do things that catastrophically threaten the continuation of that existence, and in which, in the name of the flourishing of life, people make decisions that cause the quality of life to decline. For many centuries, modern society, focused on maximising its own security, has taken steps to control nature and master its processes so that nothing surprises us and everything serves our idea of benefit. The result is a climate crisis, a geopolitical crisis and a political-psychological crisis.
Does this self-destructive logic also manifest itself in our pursuit of happiness?
The ideal of modern society is permanent self-improvement, the belief that we can live ever more happily. We download wellbeing apps, monitor our sleep, the number of steps we take, our minutes of meditation and the protein content of our food. We set more and more goals and long to achieve them quickly. In such a boundlessness of the desire for happiness, it is only a matter of time before we collapse. The result is anxiety, a sense of failure and self-hatred. The desire for boundless happiness leads to profound unhappiness. The same applies at the level of politics: the peculiar illusion of late-modern society that it had achieved the ideal of liberal democracy, and the idea that some slower countries (for example, post-communist ones) merely had to try a little harder to catch up with the West and everything would be resolved, ultimately led, as we can see today, to enormous disillusionment and crises. The problem, however, is that where we have ended up is the result of a mistaken illusion, and if we now feel disappointment, resentment and inner anger, it would be good to say to ourselves that no injustice is being done to our rights and claims, but that we are experiencing the consequences of our fatal illusion about the end of history. We must realise that history has not ended and that, in the name of a life that was supposed to achieve an ideal, we have become destroyers of the habitability of our actual lives.
The blurb of your latest publication, Philosophy of a Habitable Life: On the Principles of Resilience Theories (2026), says that the book offers an original philosophical conception of a habitable life, defined in opposition to critical vitalism, biopolitical theory and the phenomenology of finitude, and that it contributes not only to understanding human suffering and happiness in general, but above all to capturing the key problems of our societies.
As I have already mentioned, resilience first appeared as a scientific concept primarily in the applied sciences. These sciences captured a phenomenon that was difficult to name, introduced a neologism into their vocabulary in order to approach the observed phenomenon, and transformed themselves through research into this phenomenon. I consider this, in itself, a philosophical event par excellence, which in my view no one has yet addressed philosophically and with sufficient comprehensiveness. In my book, therefore, I devote myself to reflecting on the philosophical discoveries arising from scientific analyses of resilience more than to unmasking the discourse of resilience in the political, administrative and academic spheres. I do not ask exclusively whether and how administrative documents on resilience impose a dominant power discourse on citizens, how science cooperates in this and what kind of biopolitics is thereby enacted; rather, I primarily try to follow what can be thought from this concept when I systematically develop the discoveries of psychology, ecology and democratic theory.
What philosophical perspective does the concept of “a habitable life” open up, then?
I arrive at a philosophy that is not dialectical but ludic, and that in this attitude manages to think the highest possible intensity of ambivalence, with which death can be present in the midst of life and life can be born in the midst of death. I try to describe in considerable detail what it means for a living human being, a community or a democratic society to die while alive. I show that it is not merely a matter of reducing life to something like bare life, but rather a condition worse than bare death. I demonstrate how late-modern society contributes to generating this condition through the double binds present in its normativity. At the same time, however, the interpretation does not end there, and I examine just as thoroughly the conditions of what I call the restoration of life in life. I try to demonstrate that restoration cannot be achieved through a dialectical struggle with the opposing side, because the condition of post-resistance requires different strategies, different thinking and a different form of sociality. It is the possibility of being born a second time in life; this is not a metaphorical possibility, but a real one. Thirdly, I deal with the topic of flourishing. I show that the way in which living systems collapse is not the mirror opposite of the way in which they develop and flourish. This can be clearly seen in such fundamental categories of life as trust. This is also why I criticise the absolutised form of critical theory which, through its focus on various forms of abuse of power and, fundamentally, on the concept of resistance, eliminates from view a reflection on the circumstances under which human life is actually habitable and meaningful even under non-ideal conditions, and on what makes development in life (which is something different from growth or progress) possible.
What must we do to restore vitality when our life is interrupted by trauma, shock or any other “chronic disruption” in a society in which violence is growing, democracy is eroding and which is facing an ecological crisis? How can we increase our “resilience” at the individual level?
Resilience theory always speaks of restoring development in life, not of restoring strength. The point is that certain events cause the life of a person, society or democratic system to be frozen by past experience. It lives, but at the same time it rather remains in the past, at the event where everything was interrupted, where death took control of its existential experience. Restoring development in life means that the person, society or democratic system in question can see an open future ahead, one that is not merely the ghost of the past.
What can make this restoration possible?
The first important thing to say is that the restoration of development in life from this state, which I sometimes describe as dying while alive, is never guaranteed by anyone or in any way. It is not a matter of claiming that someone in whom development in life has not been restored did not try hard enough, is a weaker specimen or is not courageous enough. This process is immensely complex, and the trajectory of non-restoration is one of its entirely legitimate and eloquent forms. The trap is that within the discourse of trauma there is also an opposite epistemological, ethical and political tendency: people who have experienced trauma are labelled incurable. The aim is to give trauma sufficient weight, to show that there are experiences which simply kill a person, a society or a political regime while alive. And it is true; this really does happen. The problem lies in the blanket assertion that in all cases this is irreversible death. This paradoxically frees those around the person, relieving them of any effort and responsibility. They do not have to try – it is absolute anyway. And resilience theory shows that this is a very evasive and also very cruel claim, because the question of restoration stands or falls with how the injured person is treated by those around them. If they tell them that their life will never be restored, that they will always be ill, and perhaps even dangerous, they condemn that person to death and social exclusion. And it is this gesture that is truly absolute. Moreover, it is a rhetorical gesture often adopted by critical theorists in a peculiar effort to demonstrate the cruelty of relations of power and biopolitics. It is not fair, however, to use traumatised people as walking victims for the purposes of criticising the system – if a person returns from trauma to development in life, this in no way diminishes the cruelty of the system that brought them into the state of dying while alive. The restoration of development in life is possible, although it is not guaranteed. The issue of cruelty and violence is a different matter, and is not eliminated by this. The factors that must contribute to restoration include the readiness of the social environment and institutions to remain close to the person concerned, to endure, if necessary, both their own powerlessness and that of the person, to listen attentively enough, to articulate their story and thereby confirm that we have all heard them and that their story becomes part of our memory, and to change normativity, institutional practices and public policies. On the part of the person who has gone through such an experience, it is possible to adopt an immensely complex and difficult-to-define attitude which Boris Cyrulnik calls “betraying trauma”. In a state of trauma, death dominates our entire phenomenological field; it cannot be denied, it cannot be overcome (there is nothing with which to do so), and it cannot be opposed with a dialectical counterforce. It is possible to outwit it, to pretend that you belong to it, but to cheat on it with life, which one’s patient and attentive surroundings offer. At some point, then, it may – perhaps – happen that death in life becomes a thing of the past and life begins to continue.
The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, representation in the Slovak Republic