Hope Against Hope

Thomas Scarborough. After the Veldfire.

By Thomas Scarborough

There are better things to look forward to.  That is what hope is about.  I hope to be happy.  I hope to be well.  I hope to succeed.  Even through struggle and strife, I hope for it all to be worthwhile.  The philosopher Immanuel Kant put it simply, ‘All hope concerns happiness.’ 

But wait, said the ancient Greek philosophers.  On what does one base such hope?  Hope is 'empty', wrote Solon. ‘Mindless’, wrote Plato.  Then the Roman philosopher Seneca saw the dark side, which has cast a shadow over hope ever since.  Hope and fear, he wrote, ‘march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope.’

The standard account of hope is this: the object of hope must be uncertain, and a person must wish for it—and here is the trouble with hope.  There is not much about hope that is rational.  We have no sound reason to believe it is justified.  It is clear that one’s hopes may not come true.

Why then hope?  Even when hopes are fulfilled—if they are fulfilled—the journey often involves struggle, and heartache, and not a little luck.  And when I have been through all that, I may well have to go through it all again.  Another goal, another relationship. How often?  At what cost?  Often enough, our hopes, once realised, may still disappoint.  They so often leave us with less to hope for than we had before.

There is a psychological problem, too.  It is called the ‘problem of action’.  Today few disagree that, most basically, I am motivated to act when I hold up the world in my mind to the world itself, and there discover a disjoint between the two.  To put it another way, we are motivated by mental models.

Yet the opposite is true, too.  Just as a disjoint between expectation and reality motivates me, so a lack of such disjoint demotivates me.  It may potentially remove any motivation at all.  We cannot go on with a view of the world which is born of the world itself.

There is a hope, observed the philosopher Roe Fremstedal, which occurs spontaneously in youth, yet is often disappointed in time.  Many start out in life with high hopes, pleasant dreams, and enthusiasm to spare.  But as we progress through life, disillusionment sets in.  And disillusionment, presumably, means coming to see things for what they are.  The disjoint is lost.

And then, death. What kind of hope can overcome death?  Death destroys everything.  An anonymous poet wrote,

Nothing remains but decline,
Nothing but age and decay.

Someone might object.  ‘This is seeing the glass half empty.  Why not see it half full?’  But put it like this.  There is certainly no greater reason to hope than there is to fear or despair.

Is there hope for me?  Is there hope for my environment?  For society?  History?  The universe?  I side with the ancient Greeks.  They had the courage to tell it like it is.  Hope as we generally know it is mere deception and superstition.  ‘Hope,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.’

When I was at school, we sang a song.  To schoolboys at the time, it seemed like a statement of boundless optimism and cheer.  Titled ‘The Impossible Dream’, it came from a Broadway musical of 1965—and it closes with these words:

Yes, and I'll reach
The unreachable star!

It seems hard to tell now whether the songwriter was sincere.  Some say that the striving which the words represent is more important than the words themselves.  Some say the songwriter was characterising his starry-eyed younger self.  More likely, it seems, he was raving against a contradictory universe, in a nonsensical song.

People have tried in various ways to get around the problems of hope.  We should best project our hopes onto something else, they say: society, history, eternity.  Some have said that hope just happens—so let it happen.  Some have said that we should quell our hopes—which might work if our minds did not transcend time.  Lately, hope tends to be studied as a mere phenomenon: this is how we define it; this is what it does.

The only way to hope in this life, wrote the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, is to ‘relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good’.  In fact, ‘at every moment always,’ he wrote, ‘one should hope all things’.  We hope, because there are all good things to look forward to, always.*

If this is to be true, there is one necessary condition.  All of our present actions, and all events, must serve our good and happiness.  Even our greatest disappointments, our greatest causes for despair—even death itself—must be interpreted as hope and be grounded in hope.  True hope cannot be conditional, as the Greeks rightly saw.

What guarantees such hope?  The theologian Stephen Travis wrote, ‘To hope means to look forward expectantly for God’s future activity’.  This de-objectifies hope—it relativises it, because God's activity cannot be known—and it provides the translation of fear and despair, to hope.  Yet even without bringing God into it, there would have to be something that translates fear and despair.  The only challenge that remains is to identify it and appropriate it.

Whatever comes my way—everything that comes my way—is something to be hoped for, not because I hope according to the standard account, but because I have an unconditional hope.  We call it ‘hope against hope’.

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* Note, however, that there is a more existential possibility. If I have an unconditional hope which is, as it were, already fulfilled in the present—the present already representing 'all good things'—then I may expect the same of the future.  This overcomes the notion that hope it too future-orientated.

If Aristotle Visited Us Today

Posted by Eugene Alper

The term 'metaphysics' was born with Aristotle. He was the first who aspired to gathering together all previous philosophical knowledge, and integrating it in a single great work.

Perhaps he felt hopeful – as one might feel on a fresh morning in the woods, with the first rays of the sun filtering through the trees. Although he was teased by a few outstanding questions, perhaps Aristotle felt that the end was truly in sight.

Yet if Aristotle visited us today, he might conclude that philosophy is in major crisis. For we have been asking the same fundamental questions – the same perennial questions – for two and a half millennia. And because of that, he might note, we are in a less enviable position than he was. For accumulated knowledge without obvious fruit affects one’s sense of self-confidence. It also undermines hope: the more knowledge, the less hope.

It is natural for the teenager – by way of analogy – to be hopeful about the future, to think that by the age of forty she will certainly know how to live a life, as opposed to her parents who, for some reasons, still do not. But when the age comes, and the former teenager asks the same question and still finds no answer, and suspects something even worse—that at the age of fifty and sixty and seventy she may still have no answer—a sense of unease dawns on her. This is what they call midlife crisis.

One wonders whether Aristotle might see, in the philosophic state of humankind today, the same sort of midlife crisis. He himself had a limited literature or recorded history to look back upon – but we, he might observe, have 2 500 years. This long view of the well-recorded past might give him – as it gives us – a deep sense of unease.

On the one hand, seeing so much treasure accumulated in literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, one can reasonably say, 'Look at the baggage of fine thought we are bringing along. Does this not give hope that its accumulation in the future may be even greater, and that, just as we have seen in technology, there may soon come a qualitative breakthrough? Isn’t this the evidence that we may be onto something? Just one more step, just one more realisation, and we may understand what the good life is?'

On the other hand, this very outlook on the past shows that our thinking, in the most fundamental ways, does not improve with time. Like the bird which greets each morning with the same old song, we fail to recognise that there is nothing new, that our questions are not different from the questions already asked by Aristotle long ago, or better than the answers he already gave.

Our baggage today, Aristotle might observe, is dubious and heavy, for the very ability to know the past and to observe the distance one has travelled without much philosophic growth may make one lose heart. Our human thinking, he might conclude, is somewhat defective, somewhat limited by nature. It could be that, by nature, our mind is incapable of going beyond the Biblical God, Plato’s One, or Aristotle’s Primary Cause. Or it could be that, by nature, our mind does better when dealing with things measurable, yet not so well with things abstract.

Perhaps, then, there is no exiting from the loop, no jumping out of the rut. On the most fundamental issues we will still think in inescapable circles, resembling the fish in the bowl, who thinks it is moving forward while sliding along the concave glass.