Drawing from deep musical experience, music pedagogue and philosopher Lukas Pairon promotes a new approach to life. The essence is captured in the title of his new book, written in English and translated into French: The Art of Positive Fatalism / L'art du fatalisme positif.
A few years ago, the author published Music saved them, they sayIt was his doctorate at Ghent University. An impressive account of his musicological and anthropological fieldwork among young people in Kinshasa who managed to 'rescue' themselves from their difficult social circumstances of poverty and violence through making music together. The research involved participatory work with a brass band and a traditional Congolese drum ensemble. Through this social music project, they came to know themselves better and, despite their limited resources, took control of their lives again to reorganize them.
Now Pairon goes further, drawing as a philosopher on what moved him most in Kinshasa from that descriptive research. He came to understand firsthand the driving and enduring strength of those young people to survive positively, their art of experiencing fatalism as something positive. This doesn't mean passively accepting your fate and resigning yourself to it, nor does it mean displaying boundless optimism.
You understand it completely when you read the anecdote that opens the book. The author is stuck in a massive traffic jam in central Kinshasa after a downpour. He watches, listens, and experiences what's happening around him. He sees overloaded cars, minibuses bursting with people, motorcycles carrying three passengers, struggling pedestrians, everything moving at a snail's pace. And what else does he see: people joking, commenting, laughing, occasionally calling out, but not a hint of anger. That's how it is there. Everything with a certain calm in the midst of that 'blocked reality,' people with little room to maneuver, forced to accept limits to their freedom of action. These lessons from Kinshasa helped lead him to develop the concept of 'positive fatalism.'
It's that same positive fatalism he experienced during his earlier 'participatory fieldwork' in those social music projects. Reflecting further on this philosophically, he develops those experiences: how people can accomplish much together and in solidarity even when their resources are limited.
With passion, he describes in seven short chapters this life lesson and ultimately his own approach to life and philosophy. First and foremost, of course, from his initial ethnographic work, those social music projects with young people in Kinshasa, where music and poverty are overwhelmingly present. For those experiences form the basis of his conceptual thinking. His theory is grounded in the context of that daily life he himself experienced over two periods. At the same time, he sketches a heartbreaking yet almost poetic portrait of that city, where you don't need money to sing, a plastic bucket is enough as a percussion instrument, and where humor helps you survive the unbearable. Of course, he also writes with affection about the musicians and their groups he met there, then as teenagers, now as young adults, some truly successful as artists, others who dropped out. Their lives revolve around making compromises, improvising, managing shortages. Music gave them visibility and dignity. All told in genuinely moving portraits of, among others, percussionist Claudel from the Beta Mbonda ensemble, once a 'petty criminal,' trumpeter Nathalie, saxophonist Mando, and the former 'witch's child' now bass guitarist Esther...
It's precisely those stories and experiences that prompt Pairon to name this way of living, to articulate this approach to life, to draw a lesson from that precarious situation, even to develop a philosophy: their music teaches them to adopt a specific 'Sitz im Leben,' to accept uncertainties but without falling into passivity. That music gives them enough strength to rediscover themselves in their relationships with others and their world. Even though 'today' offers no guarantee for 'tomorrow,' it's about 'the art of positive fatalism.' Pairon's similar experiences in Gaza play a role in that concept. It's not about resigning yourself to such injustice, but about remaining dignified and living in those circumstances, even if the future turns out to be 'only' a compromise.
As he progresses, he describes his philosophical-anthropological theory and finds kindred spirits. He points to a similar outlook in the work of, among others, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Hans Achterhuis, Paolo Freire, and others. They too accept limits to reality but certainly don't abandon all possibilities. They advocate for action without the illusion of controlling everything, embracing life in the present moment. That's what they do in Kinshasa and above all: they keep going. Pairon likes to call it: 'habiter le présent' and that's precisely what gives them a future.
He then attempts to capture what daily life looks like in Kinshasa, what the practice of that positive fatalism entails, in a few remarkably striking passages. About living with a limited horizon, about resourceful improvisation, about small acts of solidarity and discreet help, yet being able to save in precarious circumstances, about living with dignity amid waste, about faith and religion (omnipresent), about forgiveness, and especially about living with uncertainty.
The book confronts the Westerner with a culture of living that must seem foreign to him, but seeks to make us acquainted with it. The great achievement of Lukas Pairon is to mold that culture into a wise life philosophy, into a 'positive fatalism.' At times his approach echoes concepts like 'la petite bonté' of Lévinas or the books of Dirk Dewachter, particularly his latest titled 'Waiting,' or even the Stoics. But Pairon always emphasizes that it's not about living without resistance, accepting facts passively—passivity is not an option. In an afterword, he even voices the critical voice of Congolese philosopher Philémon Mukendi, who rejects what he calls a 'paralyzing fatalism,' reproaching his countrymen for too readily accepting what their rulers inflict upon them.
Pairon draws more than just lessons from his Congolese anthropological and ethnographic adventure. The omnipresence of music and poverty in Kinshasa and how people deal with it has gradually led him to that original and remarkable concept of 'positive fatalism.' Remember from this book that this need not be a 'contradiction in terms'—for some, it's even a necessary art of living.
