The more philosophically elevated the concept, the more abstract and free of class content, the more esoteric - not to say opaque - Eagleton becomes.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the swarming anthill of rhetorical windbaggery that is Hope Without Optimism.
Moral:
"….The petty-bourgeois intellectuals are introspective by nature. They mistake their own emotions, their uncertainties, their fears, and their own egoistic concern about their personal fate for the sentiments and movements of the great masses. They measure the world's agony by their own inconsequential aches and pains."
James P. Cannon, 1940. The Struggle for a Proletarian Party
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1 The Banality of Optimism
[....]what expands the productive forces most effectively is capitalism, and capitalism in Marx's eyes is a question of injustice. This, then, is why he insists that "the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of individuals and even classes."
[....]"What has happened to the human beings who have fallen, " comments Max Horkheimer, "no future can repair. . . . Amid this immense indifference, human consciousness alone can become the site where the injustice suffered can be abolished, the only agency that does not give in
[....]It is striking how few Marxists appear to have asked themselves whether even the most resplendently emancipated future could outweigh this saga of sorrow. And this is one sense in which Marx's theory, despite himself, can properly be called tragic.
[....]For a more orthodox current of Marxism, as for the Catholic lineage of Christianity, a valid future must be dimly discernible in the present. For Marxism, it can be found in those forces which are bred by the current system yet which are capable of unlocking its contradictions.
2 What Is Hope?
[....]Claire Colebrook, for example, toys with the idea of a "hopeless feminism." "Feminism, it seems, " she writes, "may need to abandon hope— hope for a richer boyfriend, a larger pair of breasts, a slimmer pair of thighs and an even more unattainable handbag of the day— in order to imagine a future that would release 'us' from the clichés on which we have glutted and which have drugged us into a lack of nerve. Utopia could only be achieved through an intense hopelessness."
[....]the left's suspicion of hope is not entirely groundless. Images of utopia are always in danger of confiscating the energies that might otherwise be invested in its construction.
[....]Yet even the most terrible events of our epoch can yield grounds for hope. As Raymond Williams points out, if there were those who perished in the Nazi camps, there were also those who gave their lives to rid the world of those who built them
[....]In Aquinas's view, faith and charity are logically prior to hope, whereas for both Kant and John Stuart Mill it is hope in God which leads us to postulate his existence. The same is true of Miguel de Unamuno, who claims in The Tragic Sense of Life that we believe because we hope, not vice versa.
[....]What, however, if hope were an illusion? It would be no obvious reason to write it off. For Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, hope is a therapeutic fiction, one that sustains us in existence by persuading us to pursue one chimerical goal after another: Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blest. It is a deceptive statement, considerably less positive than the brisk heroic couplet form makes it sound.
[....]There may be no hope; but unless we act as though there is, that possibility is likely to become a certainty. The Freud of The Future of an Illusion views religious hope as a nurse recounting fairy tales to a child, and wishes to purge the world of such consoling fictions. Erik Erikson regards hope, which first manifests itself in the infant's trust in its parents, as "both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue in being alive"; yet he also writes that in the course of the small child's development, "concrete hopes will, at a time when a hoped- for event or state comes to pass, prove to have been quietly superseded by a more advanced set of hopes, "9 a periphrastic way of suggesting that as soon as we get what we want, we want something else.
[....]In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Prometheus tells the Chorus that among his other benefactions to humankind has been the gift of "blind hopefulness, "
[....]to which they reply, unironically, "Your gift brought them great blessing." Perhaps the only happiness we can attain is a hope that it will arrive.
[....]there is a utopian core even to the most baneful or megalomaniac of hopes, as we shall see later in the work of Ernst Bloch.
[....]Precisely because it anticipates rather than simply desires, hope must intend the possible, or at least what those in the grip of it regard as possible, which is not necessarily true of desire.
[....]Thomas Hobbes.... speaks of hope in Leviathan as "an appetite with an opinion of attaining, " while Paul Ricoeur famously describes it as "a passion for the possible."
[....]There is nothing necessarily foolish about hoping in vain, but it is foolish to hope unreasonably. Gabriel Marcel maintains that one can hope for anything short of the impossible, so that a hope is not invalidated by the gross improbability of it ever coming to pass.
[....]If hope involves reason, what is one to make of Antonio Gramsci's celebrated political slogan "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"? The maxim is a warning to the political left not to allow its clear- eyed estimate of the problems it confronts to sap its resolve. Yet is cognitive dissonance really the best policy? Are the two faculties quite so easily dissociable? They can, to be sure, be divorced to some degree. You might consider, for example, that things will turn out well but hope that they will not, which is more or less the opposite of what Gramsci recommends. In general, no doubt, Gramsci well understood that the will must be rationally informed if it is to issue in constructive action. Pressed too far, however, his battle cry is in danger of lapsing into voluntarism or even adventurism. It might also in the end prove strictly impossible. You can act positively even when you regard the situation as hopeless, but you cannot act hopefully if you regard it as hopeless.
[....]In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch, who believes likewise that the self is not a possession, sees the present moment as elusive and unreadable, a surplus that eludes the concept, and in this sense as a dim prefiguring of the future. We have a foretaste of the future in our very inability to seize the impenetrable present or unpack the enigma of the self. If we were indeed able to "bite the day to the core, " in Edward Thomas's pregnant phrase, we would doubtless find ourselves in the presence not of the future but of eternity. Perhaps leisure, which bucks the tyranny of time, is one of our closest approximations to it. In Bloch's view, the "now" can be lived but not grasped, and it is in this felt opacity— this gap between the experiential and the conceptual— that the shadowy profile of the future can be discerned. Fredric Jameson detects a similar hiatus in Proust, for whom the raw material of the present must be recollected in tranquillity, mediated by art and language, if Erlebnis is to be converted into Erfahrung and experience lived through for real as though for the first time.
[....]If one could count on what is coming, Derrida argues in Specters of Marx, hope would be a calculative, programmatic affair. But there is no reason to pay the positivists the compliment of taking on board their reified version of rationality, if only hope is not simply an anticipation of the future but an active force in its constitution. As Shelley writes in Prometheus Unbound, "to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates." The lines combine a tragic view of hope with a performative one.
[....] To ensure that one's victories are minor is to warrant that one's failures are equally modest. If the good life is one of placid self- possession, it is necessary to abandon both hope and despair, moods that render us prey to the ravages of time. To jettison the future is an instant cure for anxiety. Plato's Republic sees the contented soul as one immune to shifts of fortune, resting placidly in itself rather than risking attachment to others. Aristotle, by contrast, argues in both the Ethics and the Politics that a life without risk and vulnerability is an impoverished one. Cicero writes of those fortunate souls who are "alarmed by no fears, anguished by no distresses, disturbed by no cravings, dissolved into no voluptuous languors by fatuous transports of delight." 96 In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus admonishes us to abandon hope, at least of the religious kind.
For the Stoics, the most gratifying solution to the indignities of life is death; but this goal can always be prefigured in the present in the living death or cultivated impassivity of those who lay violent hands upon themselves, rendering themselves immune to both desire and disenchantment. "Where there's death, there's hope, " remarks Don Fabrizio in Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard. If it is the catchword of the Stoic, it could also be the motto of the martyr. To be virtuous for the Stoic is not to educate one's appetites but to surmount them. The point of life is not to court Fortune but to disdain it.
[....]Schopenhauer regards hope as the root of evil, disturbing one's tranquillity with false expectations. "Every wish soon dies, " he writes, "and so can beget no more pain [i.e., of disappointment], if no hope nourishes it." 98 For Theodore Hickey of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, to abandon hope means that "you can let go of yourself at last. Let yourself sink down to the bottom of the sea. Rest in peace. There's no further you have to go. Not a single damned hope or dream left to nag you" (act 2). It is not a view that proves particularly fruitful for the bums and barflies around him, or in the end for himself.
3 The Philosopher of Hope
[....]Despite some passages of burnished splendor, Bloch's overstuffed rhetoric, slipshod poeticisms, and pseudoprofundities are the kind of thing that gives Marxist theory a bad name. If his style prefigures utopia in its imaginative brio, it also does so in its obscurity. Rarely has St. Paul's remark about seeing the kingdom of God through a glass darkly been more apposite. One turns with relief from Bloch's rhapsodic prose to the terse, aphoristic economy of a Benjamin or Adorno.
[....]"for the sake of the future he made a Faustian pact with the duplicitous present." 4 He became, in short, a full- blooded apologist for Stalinism, defending the Moscow show trials and branding Trotsky a Gestapo agent.
[....]Bloch had no doubt that the road to freedom and plurality led through state power, violence, centralized planning, collectivism, and doctrinal orthodoxy. 5 Like many of his colleagues on the left, he saw the key choice of the era as one between Stalin and Hitler. Even so, to glimpse the seeds of utopia in the Soviet Union represented a signal triumph of hope over experience, rather
[....]The Principle of Hope is in search of a form of Marxism that would rival the depth and scope of religion while serving as a critique of it. It ranges accordingly from the Gnostics to the modernists, Boehme to Bolshevism, Eldorado to Joachim de Fiore, the Orinoco delta to roast pigeons and Aladdin's lamp.
[....]Bloch's writing is at once too little Marxist and too much so— too eager to assume that almost every historical phenomenon, however remote from modern politics, can be milked for its emancipatory value, yet too intent on funneling this prodigious mass of material into the mold of historical materialism. The past may be diverse, but it has a single destination. So it is that Bloch the Stalinist exists cheek by jowl with Bloch the snapper- up of unconsidered trifles, the apologist for the heretical and offbeat, scouring the crooked alleyways and inconspicuous backstreets of human culture.
[....]It is not just that one must have material grounds for hope, but that hope for Bloch is in some sense an objective dynamic in the world— not only in human history, indeed, but in the cosmos itself. He is intent, he tells us, on producing nothing less than a communist cosmology. Marx, by contrast, may trust to the evolution of the productive forces, but he does not claim that this unfolding is somehow inscribed in the stuff of the world. It is not a metaphysical principle, as with Hegel's Geist or Bergson's élan vital. Instead, it is confined to the historical arena. Marx is impatient with metaphysical speculation, and appears to take no interest in how the cosmos is faring. He does
not claim that the world itself is trekking toward a beneficent end. Bloch speaks of "the classless man" as representing "the ultimately intended propensity- possibility of history up to now, "13 but Marx indulges in no such transhistorical fantasies. Indeed, he is at pains to deny that history has purposes of its own. Nor does he argue for some tale of unbroken progress at the moral level, as we have noted already. Fascism is no advance on feudalism.
[....]The worst is in some perverse sense a source of hope, bringing as it does the assurance that one can sink no further. One may now relax, since no amount of effort is likely to repair one's condition. One calls to mind the conundrum in which one speaker insists to another, "Things can't get any worse, " to which the other replies, "Oh yes, they can." Which of them is the optimist and which the pessimist? "If one has settled into the worst position, the lowest and most forgotten by fortune, " writes Enrique Vila- Matas in his novel Dublinesque, "one can always still hope and not live in fear." Max Horkheimer comments in his Critique of Instrumental Reason that Schopenhauer knows more than any other thinker of hope precisely because he confronts a condition of utter hopelessness. 13 For Pascal, the very direness of our condition is an ironic source of hope, since it suggests just what resources of divine grace must lie to hand to remedy it. Malcolm Bull speaks of the Muselmen or living dead of the Nazi concentration camps as "redeemed by their own hopelessness, " invulnerable to hope and therefore to hurt. 14 Power can have no hold over those who are oblivious to its stratagems. Men and women who have nothing to lose, like the beggar whose persona Edgar adopts, or like the psychopathic Barnadine in Measure for Measure, may prove to be fearless, invulnerable, and therefore dangerous. Pressed to an extreme, self- dispossession can capsize into a curious kind of freedom, as something rich and rare is born of nothing.
[....]The struggle for a just society involves an instrumental rationality, but it is not only that. The left would continue to protest against sweated labor and mass unemployment even if it were morally certain that capitalism is here to stay. Bertolt Brecht speaks in his poem "An die Nachgeborenen" of despairing only where there is injustice and no rebellion; but even if rebellion were to evaporate altogether, the fact that men and women have fought for their freedom so tenaciously over the centuries would still be a source of value. There would still, so to speak, be something to be salvaged on Judgment Day. Though justice may not flourish in the end, a life devoted to the pursuit of it remains a creditable one. Not to succeed in the end is not necessarily to have failed, any more than it is true that all's well that ends well. It is only the lure of teleology that persuades us of this fallacy. Even if history were to fall into utter ruin, it would be a matter for despair only if that catastrophe were predestined; and even then it is possible, like many a tragic protagonist, to pluck value from combating the inevitable. Indeed, unless one combats the inevitable, one will never know how inevitable it was in the first place. The truth, however, is that catastrophe is not written into the march of history, any more than hope is. However desolate the future may prove, it might always have been different. The contingency that can make for misfortune can also make for success. As Aristotle appreciates, the reason why things can decline (mutability) is also the reason why they can prosper. Besides, a lamentable future would almost certainly be the handiwork of a rapacious ruling minority, not the product of humanity as a whole.
[....]if this appalling din of hacking and gouging is to be attributed simply to human nature, it is hard to see how there could be much prospect of our condition improving. That it indeed involves human nature is not to be doubted. If human beings are capable of behaving in this way, then it follows that they have it in their natures to do so. This, then, is the bad news. The good news is that that nature is by no means unconstrained. It is molded by historical circumstance, which has not so far been greatly in our favor. Politics throughout human history has been for the most part violent and corrupt. Virtue, where it has flourished, has been largely a private or minority affair. The poet Seamus Heaney speaks in The Cure at Troy of those quasi- miraculous moments when hope and history rhyme, but the relationship between the two has more commonly resembled that of the line endings of blank verse. This, however, is partly because men and women have been forced to live under social systems that generate scarcity, violence, and mutual antagonism. It is this which Marx has in mind when he speaks of the whole of past history as weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And there is always so much more of the past than there is of the present. It is always liable, as in an Ibsen tragedy, to weigh in at a moment of crisis to crush the prospect of an emancipated future…..
Jay
11 November 2021
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