What May I Hope?

This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.

I have hesitated to respond to the Argus’s request to reflect on “How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment?” I have hesitated not because I am naïve enough to believe that the midterm electoral rebuke of authoritarian politics will mean the end of repressive surveillance, policing, and incarceration (there are simply too many vested bipartisan interests that agree with authoritarian measures such as the egregiously underreported NSPM-7 seeking to put targets on the backs of “enemies within”). Rather, I do not think it is the task of university professors to make hope “pragmatic” and to tell students how to act purposefully and efficaciously. Such guidance carries itself a slight whiff of authoritarianism by elevating the teacher to the arbiter of praxeological merit.

I remember all too well from the technocratic optimism of the Obama era what it sounds like when hope is made pragmatic. Ranging from gentle paternal scolding to unbridled cheerleading, old people encourage young people to “make a difference” by appreciating beauty, trusting themselves, joining an activist cause, exercising their right to vote, or simply taking out their earbuds. Lessons of this kind, useful as they are in the here and now, miss the enduring moral import of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s practical question “What should I do?” and skirt past his related theoretical questions “what can I know?” and “what may I hope?”

The last question is of course the crucial one for my assignment. Kant poses it but does not answer it. He merely suggests that “all hoping is directed towards happiness,” and adds anticlimactically: “Hoping ultimately leads to the conclusion that something is (which determines the ultimate end) because something ought to happen.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 834)

To me, Kant’s sliding from ought to is looks indistinguishable from wishful thinking. He must have been aware of this when he decided that knowledge of the “ultimate end” of hope was best left to religion. I mention Kant here because of his philosophical insistence that hope is more than a subjective impulse; hope is real because the world is meaningful. Hope, in the language of philosophy, is a purposive or teleological principle. Kant thought, taught, and wrote during the age Enlightenment and the French Revolution, an eminently hopeful stretch of world history for those lucky enough to belong to the Western bourgeoisie. Since then, the “age of extremes” (Eric Hobsbawm) and our current “time of genocide” (as my colleague Jesse Torgerson put in his letter on pragmatic hope) have rendered the question “what may I hope?” empirically fraught to the breaking point.

On the eve of America’s entry into World War I, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey confidently pronounced that “education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men” since open-ended educational, interactive growth of the individual harmoniously corresponded with the progressive betterment of humankind’s natural and social conditions: “To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity.” (John Dewey, Democracy and Education) “Gradual amelioration” is the lodestar of pragmatic hope.

In contrast to Dewey’s “practical idealism,” Ernst Bloch’s three-volume The Principle of Hope offers an indefatigable utopian polemic against meliorism, gradualism, and utilitarianism. Similar to other Critical Theorists who came to the US as refugees from Nazi Germany, Bloch viewed philosophical pragmatism as a cult of success aligned with the profit-imperative: “Underlying American pragmatism is the view that truth is nothing more than the commercial usefulness of ideas.” For Bloch, “pragmatism” and “hope” were diametrically opposed. “In the age of imperialist war, pragmatism showed itself for what it is: the final agnosticism of a society stripped of any will towards the truth” (Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1.)

An agnostic society has surrendered its ability to act critically, reflectively, rationally. Radical change, Bloch argued, requires anticipatory knowledge that breaks the iron grip with which the past rules over the present. We all are capable, he believed, of nonpragmatic utopian hope: we activate it unwittingly, in our indistinct daydreams and confused wishes. We find the principle of hope not in the well-meaning advice and prescriptions our elders dish out to us, but in the wishful images that circulate in the fantastic realm of fairy tales and illusions. To grasp – intellectually and conceptually – the possibility of hope beyond the narrow pragmatic horizon of success presents the only possibility of breaking the debilitating logic of incrementalism that keeps perpetuating and intensifying the cumulative ills of the past.

If you find Bloch’s Principle of Hope too over the top, you can turn to Kant for the only pragmatism compatible with radical change: act as if what you can only hope for – what ought to be real – were indeed within reach.

Ulrich Plass is a Professor of German Studies and can be reached at uplass@wesleyan.edu.