In Our Time - Hope

Episode Date: November 22, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophy of hope. To the ancient Greeks, hope was closer to self-deception, one of the evils left in Pandora's box or jar, in Hesiod's story. In Christian tradition, hope became one of the theological virtues, the desire for divine union and the expectation of receiving it, an action of the will rather than the intellect. To Kant, 'what may I hope' was one of the three basic questions which human reason asks, while Nietzsche echoed Hesiod, arguing that leaving hope in the box was a deception by the gods, reflecting human inability to face the demands of existence. Yet even those critical of hope, like Camus, conceded that life was nearly impossible without it.WithBeatrice Han-Pile Professor of Philosophy at the University of EssexRobert Stern Professor of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldAndJudith Wolfe Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, according to the poet Hesiod, hope was all that remained in Pandora's jar, once all the evils inside had escaped and spread across the world.

He wrote that in the 8th century BC, and ever since philosophers have been divided over hope and why it remained. Was it something valuable that would help humanity deal with those evils, or was it another of those evils, perhaps the worst?

To Hesiod, it was for the gullible, but St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas turned it into one of the three virtues along with faith and love. Kant made it a cornerstone of his philosophy, while Nietzsche argued it was a delusion, and the debate continues. With me to discuss the philosophy of hope

are Beatrice Hanpile, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, Robert Stern, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheff and Judith Forth, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St. Andrews. Beatrice Hanpao, why was hope in Pandora's jar in the first place? Well, we don't really know. I mean, it's open to interpretation. And when we look at the myth, one important thing is to remember that it's a story of revenge.

Zeus was angry at Romithius for having stolen fire and given it to mortals. And so he decided to give us a gift of his own, which was Pandora and her jar. her name means all gifts, but the gift was poisoned. So Heziod himself doesn't tell us the meaning of the myth. How you interpret it depends mostly on two things. The first is whether you take hope to be a good or an evil. And the second is whether you take the jar to be a prison that keeps hope from us or whether you take the jar to be a pantry that keeps hope for us. But either way, it's not obvious because if you say that hope is a good, then the question, which is kept for us by the job,

then the question is, as you were saying, why was it in the jar in the first place? If you think it's an evil, then the question becomes, well, why would Zeus who was bent on revenge not have released it with the rest? So historically, there are two main interpretations of the myth. One is what you could call the pessimistic line.

It's the one that one could attribute to Hesiod, that takes hope to be an evil and the jar to be a pantry. And Hesiod, when he tells the myth, doesn't say anything about the value of hope, and he uses a neutral Greek word, Elpice. But further down in works and days, he calls hope empty and no good. And the idea is that it deprives men from their industriousness. So the thought is, you know, instead of working, they just sit down and hope and then presumably start further down the line. So on that reading, hope is an evil. The jar makes it available to us. And every time we hope, well, we just fall prey to the circus.

Now you got the other line, what you could call the optimistic line, which starts with the idea that hope is a good. So the first person who seems to take that line is a 6th century Greek poet called The Ognes of Megara. And he says that hope was the only good left to mankind. And then Nietzsche, when he looks at the myth, says that basically we've been taught by Christianity to look at hope as a good. So on that second story, then hope is a good that's in the job for us to alleviate the evils. But one thing to note, it's really important, is I think you can only read the story in this way if you turn away from the original spirit of Hesiod's narrative, namely that it's a story of revenge.

because then it's not clear why Zeus would want to help us by giving hope as well as the other evils. And that's a friction point I think that Nietzsche picks up upon, so maybe we'll get back to that. But these are really the two main lines. So how did Pandora get hold of the box? She was given the box. She was, yes, the piffos, the jaw.

Well, she was in the stories that Zeus asked Hephaestos to make a woman out of clay. that's Pandora, then he asks all the gods and goddesses to give her gifts. And so she's endowed, Athena teaches her craft, et cetera. And I think Aphrodite gives her beauty, but also a craven heart. And she comes with the jar. The jar is part of the poisoned gift, so to speak. She doesn't steal it.

But one important thing is that when she opens it, it's on Zeus's order. but when she closes it, that's also on Zeus' order. Why does she close it so quickly? Well, I don't know why it was that quick, because all the evils escaped, so I suppose. Except her. So she's a bit clumsy. Is that part of the plan?

Well, it is part of the plan. That's a really interesting thing. Hesiod says it's by the will of Zeus, Aegis bearing. And so that's one reason why it's difficult part of the Christians to think that, at least in the original story, hope is a good, because it's all part of Zeus's intent, you know, that it should be invadjol with the other evils.

Judith Wolfe, Plato had something to say about good, didn't he? He did. Plater is an interesting question because he thinks, of course, that hope is often a vain hope. It's a passion of those who are uneducated and so can be exploited. But he also does think that there is something like a true hope. that we might once again, by philosophy and love, rise up to the knowledge or vision of the forms that he sees as being beyond the rim of the universe. And so there is a hope in the philosophical life that we might escape the body into which we were cast by our passion and rise up to the vision of the forms. And the Jewish idea of hope is very powerful as well, which feeds into later ideas. The Jewish idea of hope is very different. And the Jewish idea of hope is that the history of the world is not cyclical,

as the classical thinkers believed, but rather linear, that it moves towards an end. And the Jewish hope is specifically that that end is the fulfillment of a promise that was given with the creation of the world and reaffirmed by the election of Abraham that God would come to dwell with his people or his people with him. And did these two ideas feed into the big shift in the idea of hope which came with St. Paul? I think you can say that, yes. I think if we're thinking with Pandora's box, Paul would have agreed that on a secular reading of the world, the negative narrative is the right one, that if there is no object to hope, then hope is in vain and is an evil. But the radical innovation, I think, is that he thinks that hope does have an object, that it's not in vain. And if we want to think with Paul and Plato, or more even so with the Apostle John or the writer of the Johannan epistles and with Plato,

then the radical innovation is that whatever the good or the forms or the eternal that it is Plato's hope or desire to view has come down to us. And God has chosen to dwell with man in the figure of Christ. So for Paul and for the other New Testament writers, Christ, by being the incarnate God who dies and rises again, makes possible the vision of a life that's no longer bounded by death. and that's what it means for him to dwell with God or God with man. But Paul brings it into this extraordinary, important trilogy of love, faith and hope, which gives it huge status all of a sudden. That's right.

The thing that was dismissed by Hesiod and not taking terribly seriously by Plato, he's now up front. Absolutely. So for Paul, particularly in the epistle to the Romans, in the epistle to the Corinthians, Paul describes the life that we were made for, the life that creation is meant to be as the life of an embryo

that has become born or of a wheat that has sprung from the seed. And so for him the present state is merely that of the embryo or that of the seed waiting to burst forth. And he says in Romans 8 for example the whole of the earth is groaning

in labor pains. So for Paul, our true life won't be fulfilled until we see God face to face in the Eschaton. The four or five centuries on St. Augustine comes in and adds his contribution to the development of this idea. Could you sum that up? Augustine is much more explicitly neoplatonic, so he works much more explicitly in platonic and neoplatonic categories than Paul. And so to some extent, Augustine transposes all of this into the category of time and eternity.

He tells us in the confessions that we are stretched on the rack of time, hoping for the release of eternity. And of course the famous words, God, you have made us for yourself. We are restless until we rest in D. Feeds very much into that. So for Augustine, temporality itself is merely a preliminary stage, something that stretches us out, that diffuses us, and that we hope to overcome in what he calls the beatific vision of seeing God face to face.

Was it Augustine's idea or St. Paul's idea that carried on towards the early Middle Ages? Both of them. I think we see in the early Middle Ages, And through all of Christian histories, really, these two basic strands of the Christian hope. On the one hand, for the renewal of the earth, the coming again of Christ, this feeds into all the apocalyptic myths that erupt whenever there is a great moment of crisis in history. And on the other hand, the idea that because we were made for something that is not possible within our spatiotemporal existence, the hope is for arising above that existence into a heavenly one. Robert Cern, in some way, was the idea of hope being changed by new dreams of the future as the Middle Age is pushed on? Yes, I think you can trace through the development of ideas of hope and change over time as we move beyond the Christian period, for example.

So, I mean, if we're thinking about how does hope develop overall, some things, I think, stay the same within the tradition that we'll be tracing out. So the equivocal view of hope that we've had in Pandora stays through into the later periods into the modern era. But as we move through to the modern era, obviously what we lose is a sense of, or the full Christian conception of hope and the context for hope. Obviously, that carries through into the Middle Ages, but as we move into a modern philosophy and more contemporary philosophy, that's what gets lost along the way. But I think one thing that becomes interesting as the history develops is how one thinks of hope with the gradual loss of the religious context. So you still retain through to modern thinking about hope. The idea is there's an object of hope, but instead of God, it's some other future.

And a source of hope, again, instead of being God, it becomes ourselves. and the basis for hope that we have in our own virtuous development and a different ground of hope. You'll get to that. I'd like to stay where we are in the sort of middle, middle age is rather pedantic, I'm afraid, sort of going through that. Is there anything in the early and later medieval notion of hope? Is it a one thing or other ideas developing alongside?

Is it seeding other notions which will come to play later on, like notions of utopia and stuff like that? Well, so one thing I think that comes into the Christian context, once you have the discovery of Aristotle and the interest in Aristotle, it's the question of whether hope should be seen as a virtue. Well, he says it's a virtue because it makes you courageous, doesn't it? Well, he never actually calls it a virtue, but he does associate it with courage,

so one can think of it perhaps in virtue terms. But when we get to Aquinas, it is then thought of as a virtue, but as a theological virtue, which obviously puts it in a very different framework. In terms of questions of eschatology, so working towards an idea of a second coming or the end of history, as it were, obviously that does, the notion of eschatology remains within the medieval Christian traditions and ideas of the ends of history, which again will develop into the more modern period with different conceptions of the end of history. Beatrice, there were tensions between hope and faith in Christian thought, they're exemplified

by Peter Lombard. Can you tell us what his view was? Yes, well, in the 12th century. Sure. Well, the inheritance he gets is the thought that the three theological virtues, that's faith, hope and love, have to be together. If you have the one, you must have three. And he's not so sure about this. And so he asks two questions. The first is, well, does Christ need all three? And secondly, do we need all three? And in particular, could there be a tension between faith and faith? and hope. So the answer to that question is that Christ only needs love. But the tension between faith and hope, I think, is an interesting one because it ramifies down the philosophical tradition, the theological tradition, down to Luther and particular. So you can put it as a dilemma. The thought is this. Faith is certainty about salvation. So if you have faith, then, you don't need hope because you know it's going to come. And if you look at the,

other end of things. If you are hoping for salvation, then that could be taken to mean that actually your faith is not strong enough. So then the fact that you hope becomes a sign that you're not, you're lacking in faith. So it's a difficult problem and the Lombard comes up with an ingenious solution. He says that he redefines hope. He says it's for certain expectation of future glory. So how does that help? Well, it's because he thinks that hope is preceptic. He thinks that hope is a representation of a future good in the present by the work of imagination. So the idea is that I can be sure because of my faith that I will be saved, but however, I can represent, if you like, that happy moment as something which I long for, as a good

which I want to have through hope so long as we think of hope, not as bearing on the possible, but as he says, as a certain expectation. So he reconciles, if you like, the two theological virtues, but at the cost, possibly, of removing the uncertainty, which some might say is at the core of hope, because certainly in ordinary language, you can only hope for things that you're not sure about. If you think something is impossible, you can't hope for it.

And if you think it's certain, then you expect it, but you don't hope for it either. So his solution is really at the fact. cost of transforming the notion of hope a bit. And then we come, Judith Wolfe, we come to Thomas Aquinas, who had a big impact on this. Can you just tell us what he added to the argument about hope? Thomas took Lombard's ideas about hope and ontologized them. And what I mean by that is he inscribed them in the way that he understood what it is to be human.

So Aquinas takes the notion that hope is for a future glory and makes of it the idea that humans were made and called to an end which it is not in their own power to achieve. In other words, even though he thinks that there are things that make us happy in a natural way, he also thinks that our ultimate happiness is not one that we can naturally achieve. It's a supernatural end because it is, in some sense, communion with God. So Aquinas thinks that we were made for communion with God. we cannot achieve that communion with God by our own power, just as we can't achieve communion with a loved one by our own power without that loved one coming to us.

And so he thinks that it's always an object of hope that we will indeed be drawn into that divine communion. And so hope for Aquinas is the refusal to deny that our deepest desire is for something that we can neither attain by ourselves nor do without. He distinguishes between ordinary hope and theological hope. Could you point that out to the listeners? Ordinary hope for Aquinas is part of his inventory of passions.

It's one of the irascible passions. In other words, the kinds of passion that represent a good or an evil as difficult as creating an occasion for courage or for fear, rather than a concursable passion, which is simply the enjoyment of a good. And so hope in the ordinary sense is simply an irascible passion. It's a pleasurable anticipation of the possible fulfillment of a desire that might be difficult to attain, but can nevertheless be imagined as being attained. Whereas theological hope is not a passion but a virtue. In other words, it's a habit of the will.

It's something that the divine grace infuses in us. We can't have hope in the theological sense without receiving it as a gift from God, because it's only by that gift that we can even imagine that we might have a chance. of attaining this fulfillment. But it's something that we have to train the will to believe in. He quoted the commentators, didn't he? I think it's a wonderful quotation. God became man so that man could become a God. He takes that from many of the church fathers.

It's most famously said by Athanasius. And the idea here, I think, is that Christ came to die and rise again, partly in order to atone for sin, but primarily not because sin is so great that it required such a great sacrifice to restore, but rather because, as I said before, humans were created, not yet fulfilled, not yet complete, but rather were created for a purpose that they could not fulfill without God becoming man so that they could become God, in other words, join the divine life in some sense.

So Christ's completed creation. Exactly. And the idea of hope, well, first of all, in the Christian face of, first of all, was because the hope was that there would be resurrection very soon after Christ's death. that didn't happen. So to find reasons why it didn't happen and work out how to keep that idea going. The odds were that he wasn't going to be resurrected in their lifetime, the next lifetime, the next lifetime, and so on. How did they achieve that? Well, it wasn't so much the resurrection as the second coming.

That's what I meant, right? Yes. My mistake. So the earliest epistles of Paul and so forth do seem to speak to an assumption that Christ would return within their lifetime. and the later epistles of Paul and much of later Christian literature really is concerned with this question, why didn't it happen? And they do come up with a good number of reasons, the most important of which, of course, is that the initial anticipation was not that the Gentiles would be part of whatever the promise was, at least among some of the early Jewish Christians. And the realization that this was a gospel for all of mankind and would therefore require a period of, growth and expansion and spreading of the word, made them think, well, maybe we have a bit more time now to gather in everybody.

Another strand of rationalization, if you want to call it, that was precisely what I said before, about the possibility that we might be talking about a completely different state rather than simply a return to this earth. And the other life would be another life else well. Exactly. And so the idea was transferred to post- death rather in their lifetime. In some cases. I don't think the two have to be

intention, but they certainly have been in history. Robert Stern, what did Martin Luther add to this? 1517, Thesis and so on and so forth. Yes. Apodontasism blew up the Catholic Church. Right. Yes. So now we're talking about a rather different context, the context of the Reformation. And that brings about, I think, some important changes. So one issue is the conception of hope as a theological virtue, which is central to the debates around the Reformation about how much one can develop the virtue to some extent by oneself and how much there is divine assistance. So as Jews that are saying, even on the sort of traditional Catholic view, one can't develop the theological virtue is all by

oneself, but the virtues are there to be developed to some extent by taking steps in the right direction. And Luther is critical of that whole structure and doesn't want to think about virtues at all, doesn't want to think about it in what he took to be Greek terms. And so what does he want to think about that adds to this argument? Well, so what were thought of as theological virtues become a matter of grace, and to that extent he's going back to a sort of earlier language, Augustinian language of grace. So it all comes from God, nothing from us. But also, I think, importantly, even related to that, the three virtues that we've been talking about,

faith becomes the central one. and I think he is thinking that hope is as a were second best or drops away in importance because for him if you have faith and again in a way going back to Lombard as Beatrice was mentioning if you have faith it's not clear really what role for hope there is anymore and so he's viewing the if you like the Catholic structure

where you have faith in certain propositions or certain church doctrines, and then that can give you hope. But for Luther, faith is a matter of grace that you're in effect given, and once you have it, so he who is baptized and believes shall be justified, there's nothing more to hope beyond faith. So I think hope is a problem from that point of view for Luther. Also, I think there's a worry that hope is a kind of block to the sort of despair that you're really going to need if you're going to find faith. And this brings us back to Pandora in a way, that hope can be deceptive and turn into a kind of optimism that might be a block to faith.

So, as I would understand it at least, the only place where hope remains is still at the eschatological level, the second coming and so on. That is something one can hope for. but that isn't your own personal salvation or justification. That is a matter of faith and hope drops away in importance. Beatrice, was one of the concerns about hope was that was necessarily beyond human control? Yes, well, I think it takes us back to the question of whether hope can be a virtue because at least in Aristotelian terms,

if something is going to be a virtue, it's got to fulfill at least two conditions. One is it's got to help you flourish, it's got to contribute to the good life, and the other is you've got to be able to practice it. You've got to be able to develop it, to exercise it. Now, if you look at hope, it's not clear that this works because we all know that hopes can be very foolish, they can be destructive, it can be irrational,

and so whether hope contributes to the good life or not is an open question. And it's not clear at all that we can practice hope. it would be a little bit like, I don't know, practicing, winning at the lottery, because we can't make ourselves hope. We can't make ourselves cease hoping. And while hopes can go up and down, it's not clear that it's because it's something that we do. You know, if you take a person who is ill and who hopes to recover,

if the results of tests are good, then hopes are going to go up. If the results of tests are bad, then the hopes are going to go down. But it's not clear that it's something that she does. So if that's true, then hope doesn't look like a very good candidate for being a virtue. And I think that's reflected in the fact that the Greeks actually don't really speak about hope much. And when Aristotle speaks about the connection between hope and courage, she actually says that hope can get in the way of courage, because if it's good hope, as he calls it, a elpice,

then it gives you the confidence that things are going to turn out well. And if you have that, you can't have fear. And if you can't have fear, you can't have courage. So the connection here is not obvious either. So maybe that's why, you know, hope really doesn't feature very high. It's because it's not a virtue of control, if it's a virtue at all. And the Greeks were bent on, you know, measure and self-mastery. So for the Christians, it's a bit the opposite.

The fact that you can't control hope actually becomes a good thing. as Bob and Judith were saying, it's got to be given to you by grace and it is a virtue in the sense of being a virtue of dependency, a virtue of powerlessness. By receiving hope, you realize that what you want most is not something that you can bring about

and that even the fact that you hope is something that's given to you by God. So it's not a virtue of control, but that's okay because anyway, as Augustine thinks, you know, the virtues of the ancients are vices in disguise. So you'd be very wrong to think that self-mastery is good. And from that perspective, hope is excellent precisely because it's not a virtue of mastery.

So you may want to say, but well, if you're not a Christian, what should you think? And at the moment, there is contemporary debate about whether hope can be a virtue. The question is not settled. But one thing that's interesting to me is that the people who tend to think of it as a virtue, then move it towards the direction of control.

They tend to think of hope as a special kind of planning or as positive thinking. And then it becomes easier to see how it could be a virtue, but it may be harder to see why this should be called hope. So the question is open, I think. Judith Mouffe, how and why did hope begin to move from the religious debate into the secular debate? Well, we're really talking about the Enlightenment here and about the Enlightenment crisis of Revelation. As you know, Locke said that the strength of our belief in something should be commensurate with the reliability of the source. And so even though Revelation, with its promise of a second coming or its promise of a fulfillment that's supernatural and kind, even though Revelation might be true, we don't have enough evidence that it is true. And therefore, it can't be the source of,

a hope that is founded in a promise. And so I think the philosophers then who continue to see hope as a virtue do so because they think that there's a rational basis for it. It's no longer because it's underwritten by a promise in Revelation. It's because it's underwritten by the structure of the world, by an inherent dynamic of the world, or by the structure of reason or the will, as it is in Kant. And so we see a very interesting transposition of the grounds of hope, as Beatrice was also saying, from a promise given from without to something that's inherent in the dynamic of either the human being or the world as a whole. Robert, Robert Stern, when Kant, you brought up, Cantud addresses the problem, he puts hope quite highly.

He says there are three things about what I know, what can I know, what can I do, and what can I hope for. so Hope's up there in the top trilogy again. What's your meaning there? Yes, so many of the early modern philosophers, so Descartes and Sohaw and Hobbes mention hope, but largely in the context of passions and thinking about the passions and thinking more about just human psychology.

So Kant, as you rightly say, gives it a systematic importance that it hadn't really had since the medieval period, Christian period. What's he meaning there? Well, it connects fundamentally to Kant's conception of the relation between religion and ethics. As Judith was saying, once you lose the idea of underpinning religion by Revelation, the question is, what do you do with it? Yeah.

And one way of seeing how that works is thinking about the title of one of the key works where Kant discusses this, religion within the limits of reason alone. And it's a good title because it really tells you what it's trying to do. It's religion within the limits of reason, so we're not appealing to revelation, but within limits of reason, and Kant, meaning by that, that Kant puts constraints on how far reason can replace revelation. Reason itself has its limits. Reason cannot establish fundamental metaphysical questions, such as whether we have free will, whether God exists, whether there's an afterlife.

So then there's a question of how we're going to get to and address those kinds of questions. And rather than leaving it closed, Kant opens up another route which is practical reason, not theoretical reason which the metaphysical route is blocked, but practical reason which tells us about ethics. That is, it tells us the moral law. tells us, for example, various actions that we shouldn't lie, but also sets us various moral ends or tasks,

including working towards what can't cause Summon Bonham, the highest good, and also our own moral perfection. What that licence is then is a belief, what can't cause glau, something actually close to faith as much as belief, in certain what then looked like religious, claims that, for example, if we're going to attain the highest good, then a benign creator has

to be possible. Hope. The question is if Kant has established these various moral ends are possible, the question is how difficult or easy is it for us to achieve them? And that's where you need hope, because if they're too easy to achieve, then you will give up and allow God to bring happiness about without your efforts. But if they're too hard to achieve, then you'll also give up. And hope has this nice middle position where it will provide you the right kind of motivation.

You hope for God's assistance, but you cannot be sure of it. So you have to make some effort while relying also on God's assistance. Thank you, Beatrice. Nietzsche's view on hope was not all that different from that of Hesiod, was it? Well, it depends on whether you're talking about the young Nietzsche or later Nietzsche. So if we speak about the young Nietzsche,

then yes, he revisits the story in human or two human. He bites the bullet and he says that hope is an evil and so that it was kept in the jar for us. But the reason why hope is an evil is different from Hesiod. And it's a really interesting one. It's not because it makes us lazy. It's because it's fundamentally deceptive.

And it hides the true nature of life from us. I mean, the young nature is not particularly optimistic about life. He thinks that it's endless suffering. And what hope does is that it sort of makes us believe that there's a good just in our reach. And instead of doing what would be the right thing, which is just give up and die, we carry on and struggle. And the right thing is expressed by the wisdom of silliness in the birth of tragedy, which is that the best thing for you would be not to be born.

And the second best is to die soon. So hope hides that from us. But if you read it that way, what's really interesting is that then it gives you a handle on what I've called the optimistic story. Because, you know, the idea that hope is there to help us. Because then on Nietzsche's reading, you can see that the optimistic story itself is an element. of what he wants to say in the pessimistic story, because why do we think that hope is a good in the optimistic story? Well, because we're hoping it's a good.

And so we're deceived into reading the story positively, whereas in fact it should be read negatively. And the very fact we're deceived shows that it works, so to speak. Hope is making us do that. So he solves the tension, you know, that I mentioned before, between the idea that it's a story of revenge and why would Zeus help us? When our Nietzsche's story,

just doesn't help us at all. Hope is the worst of all the gifts. So that's the young Nietzsche. Do you want to hear about the later nature or do we not have time? Okay, so I'll skip the middle Nietzsche on his criticism of theological hope. In the later work,

he calls hope a rainbow. And he says that we've got to hope to learn anew. And he doesn't give us any theory of hope. But I think there's two things that are worth saying. One is he revisits his early ideas about deception. Yeah, hope is deceptive, but that may actually be a good thing because it does help us to live. And now Nietzsche doesn't think that life is fundamentally a bad thing anymore.

So hope is a bit like art in that respect. It gives us illusions that allow us basically to carry on living. But on a more positive tone, he also thinks that hope has a transfigureative power. So it can make this life better. That's the difference with theological hope, which is all about another life. And he says, he doesn't say much, but he says one thing that's worth quoting,

he says, let your love of life be love for your highest hope. So there is a sense in which if you love life, you have to have hope. And that hope is going to transfigure your relation to life here and now. So hope doesn't work like an ascetic ideal anymore. It's something that allows you to live in the present, but in the light of an imagine good. Judith, the link that Luther made between hope and despair,

was that carried on in Kierkegaard? Yes, I think we need to go back first to the 19th century philosophers who come before Kierkegaard. We haven't got time to do everything. So I've got to get a bit of a move on, otherwise. Very well. Can I just say one very quick thing about it? about that because it's very interesting. I mean, you have

19th century philosophers like Fisdent Hegel who do believe that hope is warranted by the dynamic of history that we're moving forward. But the interesting thing is that hope is not optimism. And so insofar as these philosophers have hope, it's not simply that things will get

better and better. It's that there will be a final state of fulfillment, a final state in which there is a wholeness and a fullness of knowledge and of peace. But at the same time, these philosophers are so committed to a sense of life as something that's defined by learning, by progress, by growth, that the final state that they envision or that they hope for turns out not only to be the fulfillment

of life, but also to be the end of it, because a final state is simply no longer recognizable as the sort of thing that they see as life and what defines it. So I think when we get to Kierkegaard and to Nietzsche, we see reactions against that, and maybe Bob has more to say about that. Can you say something about Keikgaard? Yes, as you said, I think you can see in some ways Keekardt returning to the Lutheran position, and obviously he's happier to embrace the theological framework than say Kant had been. So genuine hope has to be arrived at through despair.

So I think that's where you get a nice and interesting distinction between hope as a rather shallow optimism, in effect, and a serious hope. So just a nice quote from Kierkegaard, the higher soaring flight of hope is precisely by means of hardship and the pressure of adversity. That's the real hope. And then for Kierkegaard, the only genuine object of that hope

has to be something eternal. Earthly hopes will always let you down. Did hope figure much with the existentialists? I don't know whether there's such a cohesive group, but I can give you two snapshots if you like. I'll try and make it quick. So one is Camus and the myth of Cicepheus, and the other is Marcel and the sketch.

Cameron, Marcel. Yeah, for metaphysics of hope. So Camus takes Sisyphus, you know, pushing his rock up a hill, and then the rock comes down every time, and then Sisyphus has to push back again. It's meant as a punishment originally, but Camus tries to turn the story onto its head

and says, well, we got to imagine, Sisyphus gives us a model of a man who, he says, free of hope. And he's free of religious hope. He says, well, this life is hell, so you don't need to believe in any, you don't have to believe in any second coming. But it's also a life completely free of hope. He says that it's the total absence of hope. But he also says at the end of the book that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. So that's quite difficult.

and personally I have trouble, but I can think of two ways of imagining Sisyphus happy. One is a sort of grim realism. Camus says that Sisyphus is superior to his fate, that he's stronger than his rock. So yes, it's absurd, but I'm strong enough to live with that. And the other is a sort of ironic lucidity. Well, the whole situation is hopeless, but then I don't have to worry about it. And it sort of even becomes funny. You know, look at me, here I am again at my rock.

Marcel thinks that hope gives us wriggle room really. Yes, well it's the opposite. He thinks a life without hope is a life in exile because hope is what allows it. It's a sort of trust in the possible hope in the strong sense. It's not propositional, it's not hoping that. You hope for something that you

can't name. And it's a trust in the possible and in the fact that in ways that you can't imagine in advance, you can be transformed by your hopes. He compares the hope to a swimmer who meets the currents with grace, who can't anticipate them, but who is able to be changed and to adapt.

And that's what hope does for you. What is the, what's the state of the discussion about hope in contemporary philosophy, Judith? I think contemporary philosophy does, to some extent, grasp this nettle of 19th century problems and tries to talk about a hope that's both inescapable and impossible. We see this already in Heidegger, and I think a lot of people take their cue from Heidegger here. Heidegger thinks that we are always oriented towards a future, that we can't control or foresee, that we as humans are always incomplete in the now and are striving towards a wholeness of life that will only be there once all our decisions have been made, once we're able to survey our lives from the end.

But of course, the irony here is that by the time we reach that, we're dead. We're no longer there to see it. And so hope is ineradicable. We live in hope. And yet we have to admit that hope is also impossible. It's a sort of structural illusion. Thank you very much, Judith Wolfe, Beatrice Handpile and Robert Stern next week. Join us for the long march of the Chinese Red Army from October 1934 to October 1935, from which Maud Cedon emerged as a leader. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What did we really miss out? Can I just say that I'm sorry to be stopping on such a note of despair. And I would have liked to talk if we had had time and it doesn't really fit in, but I would have liked to talk about stories and particularly about somebody like Tolkien, who has a very strong view of the relationship between fairy tales in particular and hope. And he, as you'll remember, he says that just this tragedy is the true form of drama. So fairy tales are the true form of story and that the essence of fairy tale is the happy ending. And so he thinks that fairy tales teach us somehow that despite much evidence,

there might be what he calls a eucatastrophe at the end, a return, an unexpected return of the good, a joy, as he calls it from beyond the world, poignant as grief. And I really like that, and I think it fits in with Kant's view of the sumum bonum of the good. I mean, this idea that our most deeply and tremblingly held hope is that when all all is said and done, the good and the happier one. The good will be the happy and goodness and happiness will not be in conflict anymore. And so stories for Tolkien teach us perhaps the virtue of maintaining that kind of hope. And so literature can be part of the practice of

virtue answering a little bit to this question, well, how can we practice something like hope? Well, maybe by reading fairy tales. Well, I think there's a limit to that line of thinking, though, which is that you have to believe in the Sumbum Bonum. So there's a reason why it's called a fairy tale. You know, it's because it's supposed to be opposed to reality where things don't happen like that. And so for me, it raises the question really of how far hope can be severed from the theological framework that makes it a virtue. Because of course, if you're a Christian, you have no trouble believing in the Sambonum. But if you're not a Christian, you might think, well, that's a fairy tale. And it's no

wonder that, you know, the structure of a fairy tale replicates this. And to me, it's really an open question because what, you know, what is there, if you are to have a sort of radical hope that at the end, something will happen, you don't know what it is,

but somehow it's going to realize that hope, then what is there to support it? If you don't have a god, what are you going to trust in? And there's an interesting book, you know, it's a radical hope by Jonathan Nier, who tries to address this question. He tells

the story of Plenticou, which is, who is, sorry, an Indian chief who had a vision who told him that he had to be like the chickadee person to survive all the troubles linked to the offensive of Americans against Native Americans. And so Plentycoo was inhabited by that vision. He had no idea about how to maintain his way of life, but he thought that somehow there would be a way to maintain that way of life, even though he was seeing it destroyed in front of him because all the practices that made that way of life,

the coup planting, the sundowns, you know, stealing horses and so forth, all that was dying. And so he saw really cultural devastation. And yet he had this hope, inexplicable hope, that somehow the crow could come out of it and without being destroyed. So at the end of the book, Leah says, well, you don't need to be religious to have that kind of hope.

All you've got to believe in is the goodness of the world. But then, of course, that takes us back to our first question. You know, how can you believe in that if you're not religious? And in a way, you know, Plentico had a vision. That's what allowed him to hope. So the question remains open, I think. Humanists would say they could believe in the goodness of the world even they don't have religion. What did you want to do, Robert?

Well, I think the worry that Beatrice is raising is that a certain point this has to be amenable to evidence. So I think both Hegel and the pragmatists who we haven't mentioned think it's fine to begin with hope. In fact, that's appropriate. But at a certain point, hope can be refuted. And of course, the Christian structure, which is, again, something Kierkegaard always emphasizes, is that from a Christian perspective, hope is never disappointed. because, okay, the second coming hasn't happened today, but it could equally well happen tomorrow. And so you can maintain your hope regardless of, as you mentioned earlier,

the kind of disappointments, the historical disappointments of the second coming not happening, because, well, it could still happen tomorrow within a Christian perspective. But once you move to a more humanist one, it's not clear you've got anything to underpin that. Either you replace it with just a metaphysical optimism. that amounts to much the same, or at a certain point you give up. And I think that's a really interesting issue, say,

within political debates about the role of hope, and at what point should hope turn to something different, like anger, rather than constantly hoping that the good will win out? Is there any sense that hope was an instinct, that you can't do anything about? Not only can you not control what might happen to it, but you can't control where it comes from. I mean, the man pushing the rock.

might think this time, Sisypus, just this time, this time, this time, it might not roll down. Well, certainly Camus doesn't think that. He thinks that Sisyphus is able to live without hope and because he knows the rock he's going to come down every time. Well, I don't know about this aspect of a psychology of hope, but there is a way of tying hope to agency, which is the following. It's a thought that implicitly every time you do something, you hope that it is possible for what you do to succeed because otherwise you wouldn't bother doing it. So in that sense, there is a, you could say that hope is impossible to eradicate because so long as you are an agent, you have somehow to hope that it's possible for your

actions to succeed. And then it would be sort of built in the notion of agency, strangely enough. The city motto of St. Andrews, where I live, is dooms Spiro, Sparrow. As long as I breathe, I hope. But there is also the question where the resignation, at some point becomes an option. And the better option. You mean resigning all of him?

Yes. Again, faced with enough evidence, it seems that Sisyphus should just stop pushing that rock. But maybe pushing that rock is what keeps him alive. If he doesn't push that rock, he's dead. Maybe that would be alright. Maybe he didn't think so. Maybe he'd rather be alive than dead.

Well, there we go. then it becomes a bit like Pascal's wager that you can try and talk yourself into a hope for purely instrumental reasons. But that would be a kind of self-deception perhaps. Not the real thing. Yeah, a kind of pep talk, positive thinking. Exactly. And that isn't, I think, what we are conceiving hope to be. No, but from what you were saying about the political dangers,

and now it sounds as if, you know, hope certainly might not be appropriate in all situations. and then you've got two options. One is two opposite options, really. One is revolt, something like anger, and you give up on hope because you think it's not going to happen and something's got to happen now. And the other is resignation where you don't get angry,

but you stop desiring something like that. And these seem to be two possible outcomes if you cease to hope, if hope cease to get. It's an interesting question, I think, whether anger also has to have some element of hope within it. Yes. So I think, yes, ultimately, perhaps the only option is pure resignation. And there are figures in the history of plots which you haven't mentioned who are suspicious of the will and suspicious of notions of freedom.

I mean, the Stoics we didn't mention, Spinoza, we didn't mention, these are all people for whom the notion of giving up agency is fine. and that's precisely well, they're the ultimate enemies of hope, perhaps. That's right, but then that ties to the idea of the intrinsic link between hope and agency very neatly, because if you take that seriously, so you can't do anything without hoping that somehow you can succeed, then the question applies to resignation itself. You know, is that something that you do? And then if it is something that you do, then presumably you got to hope somehow that you can stop hoping,

and that creates a paradox. And I think people like Schopenhauer, for example, whom we didn't talk about, or Lerkeschchop, whom Bob I'm sure would love to talk about, are very sensitive to that. That's why Schopenhauer says that actually you can't resign willing yourself. It's got to be sort of drawn out of you. And it can be drawn out of you by suffering, by excessive suffering, where then comes a point where he says the will to live is killed in you and you just sort of carry on, but you go through.

emotions, that's all it is. But it's not something you do. And so it avoids this obstacle of, well, if I resign, I got to be able to, I hope that I resign. And the other one is to be claimed, he says, to realize that your own perspective is so limited that you can expand it and have empathy with the whole world, in which case then you, the will to live sort of extinguishes itself because it realizes the amount of suffering through the will and it realizes that the joy of one living being is the unhappiness of another. And so there's a sense, a metaphysical sense,

in which the will ceases to will. But again, it's not something it does. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Why is it that some people pretend to support a football team? It's important questions like that I'll be looking to unravel with the help of top experts, psychologists, and some big sporting names in my new podcast,

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