Hope: the history of a much-derided virtue
Jonathan Wright on why hope is more than just idle fancy

28 August 2009

Hope in a Democratic Age
By Alan Mittleman
Oxford University Press, £20

When you "hope" for something, what are you really trying to accomplish? Alan Mittleman suggests that there is more to hoping than vague fantasising about a better and shinier world.

Hope, Mittleman insists, can be an "idle thing" but it ought to be "strenuous and disciplined". It can start out life as an emotional response but, when it allies itself with the rigorous exercise of reason, hope has the potential to mature into something much more worthwhile. Unlike fanciful desire genuine hope strives for a goal that is achievable.

Telling the difference between the two requires assessment which, to be authentic, has to be grounded in reason, wisdom, and knowledge. As Mittleman puts it: "Longing is spontaneous and cheap. Hope is cultivated and arduous." At this point, hope becomes a virtue in and of itself and, crucially, it has profound philosophical consequences. It insists that human action and moral agency are of the utmost importance: it is the antithesis of fatalism or a stoical shrugging of the shoulders. I hope therefore I can.

As Mittleman rightly explains, hope has become very worldly, even secularised, over the past few centuries. Hope used to point towards intangible faith-bound objectives: it is now largely about achieving earthbound liberation, emancipation and change. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, and there is still something profoundly eschatological about modern-day hoping - a specific goal is still very much in sight. The difference is that positive proof is always now available when deciding whether your hopes have come to fruition.

Philosophers dreamed up their radical utopian visions and they were pursued by politicians. Similarly, liberal democracy boldly asserts the constituent parts of its social and political telos, while modern science flaunts and vaunts its endless possibilities. In all of these cases, it is relatively easy to judge whether the hope has been fulfilled.

Unfortunately, as Mittleman suggests, such projects routinely fail to deliver fully on their promises. A less easily defined and less easily adjudicated sense of hope, as articulated within the Christian and, especially, the Jewish tradition, might provide "a counterweight" to the "inflated and unrealistic promise of hope" that is currently in vogue.

There is good sense in revisiting the idea of hope as a moral virtue. Mittleman also adds that hope isn't always concerned with change: sometimes there is a place for conservatory hope.

Mittleman's book ranges widely. We hear from Aquinas and his medieval Jewish counterpart Joseph Albo, but we also learn much about the thinkers of ancient Greece who either ignored or denigrated the philosophical importance of hope. Locke, Spinoza, Descartes et al are seen dismissing hope as an unhelpful emotional impulse, swiftly followed by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer taking the phenomenon more seriously, only to condemn it as misguided and downright dangerous.

Most importantly, we are guided through the modern transformation of hope: Condorcet melding it with a faith in progress; Kant upsetting the entire philosophical applecart; the oddest of all Marxists, Ernst Bloch, using hope to launch into his exuberant utopianism.

Finally, we learn how modern theologians have coped with all this: Walter Rauschenbusch trying to erect a godly kingdom in America versus Stanley Hauerwas resigning himself to the fact that the only remaining refuge of hope was an inward-looking community disengaged from the pesky modern world.

I hope that you read Mittleman's book. It occasionally conflates the ideas of very different philosophers, it is much too conservative for my taste, and its agenda has little chance of being realised, but as a work of impassioned, fluent, well-informed philosophising it is very impressive.