Hope Without Optimism (9780300220254) by Eagleton Terry

Author:Eagleton, Terry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300217124
Publisher: Yale Univ Pr

There is a consensus among theorists that one cannot hope for what one is sure will happen.84 Hope and knowledge would seem to be mutually exclusive, rather as faith and knowledge are for the fideist heresy. The phrase ‘I hope so’ generally implies uncertainty. It is weaker than ‘I think so’, which in turn of course is less emphatic than ‘I know’. Hope for Spinoza is always mixed with fear precisely because its object is obscure. Thomas Hardy writes in Far from the Madding Crowd of ‘faith sinking to hope’, meaning, presumably, that faith is something less than knowledge and hope an even more fragile disposition than faith.

There is, to be sure, a problem with the phrase ‘what one is sure will happen’. In a nondeterministic universe there is no such thing as what is going to happen, in the sense of what will inevitably come about whatever we choose to do. This is one reason why God, who is said to have knowledge of the future, cannot know what will take place in Dallas next Monday at 6.27 pm, in the sense of knowing what is bound to take place then. In an open-ended world, there is no such object of knowledge; and if God knows the world then he must know it as it is, in its freedom, autonomy and contingency. He cannot know what will inevitably occur in much the same sense that he cannot know what a puce-coloured concept or a right-wing bottle of Burgundy would look like. Being omniscient, he knows for sure what will contingently happen in Dallas next Monday, but that is a different matter. As we shall see in a moment, he also knows for sure that his kingdom will come, but that is not like knowing that there is a tornado brewing up or an economic crisis waiting in the wings.

Even in some less hard-nosed sense of the phrase ‘what is going to happen’, however, it is not clear that to be sure of what will happen means that one cannot hope for it as well. Take the brand of scientific socialism rife in the late nineteenth century, for which the arrival of a socialist future was assured by certain ironclad historical laws, and was therefore an object of cognitive certainty. This surely did not mean that one might not still hope for that future, in the sense of looking to it with eager expectancy, being restless for its arrival, and continuing to cling to this certitude in the midst of doubts. ‘Even though things look bad, I retain my conviction that they will work out’ blends hope with a degree of certainty. An Althusserian might claim that one might possess certain knowledge at the level of science or theory, but still feel hopeful from the standpoint of ideology. Perhaps one can hope for what one thinks is bound to happen rather as one can feel remorse for a past that one acknowledges to be unalterable.

Christians see the advent of the kingdom of God as a matter of certainty, but they still regard hoping for it as a virtue.

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