Hope and History

99 Pages·1969·2.603 MB·English

by  Josef Pieper

Hope and History
JOSEF PIEPER
HERDER AND HERDER
i969
HERDER AND HERDER
232 Madison Avenue, New York 10016
Original edition: Hoffnung und Geschichte,
Kosel-Verlag, Munich, i967
Translated by Richard and Clara Winston
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-87764
© i969 by Burns & Oates, Ltd.
Manufactured in the United States
Le seul avenir
est notre objet
—Pascal: Pensees
Contents
I. What does Hope Mean ?
“For the first time”: the new urgency of the question.
“The deceived wiser than the undeceived.” Kant:
“What may I hope for?” Exegesis of linguistic usage.
The “steep good” that is not at our disposal. The
One Object of the hope. “Fundamental hope” and
“everyday hopes.” Disappointment makes the hope
possible. The hoper, and he alone, anticipates
nothing.
II. What is History ?
Historical and unhistorical happenings. Freedom
and decision. The hope of martyrs. Teilhard de
Chardin and the confusion of evolution with history.
Test case: evil. The temptation to be resigned in
the face of history. Not “jungle” but mystery. The
limits of prognosis. Historical future and prophecy.
III. Progress and Evolution
The arguments of the idealistic philosophy of pro¬
gress (Kant). Dubious visions of the future. Vain
naming of the elements; loss of overlapping structure
of meaning. The “angle” of evolutionism (Konrad
Lorenz). “God has handed over the world to their
discretion.” Teilhard de Chardin on the final state
of the earth: two mutually exclusive models. “Strike
in the noosphere” and “ecstasy in discord”. Beyond
the idea of evolution, and the greatness in Teilhard
de Chardin.
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CONTENTS
IV. Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem? 61
Ernst Bloch and his encyclopedia of the images of
hope. But what is missing? The misunderstood
supraworldliness of God. Realization of hope by
“socialist change”? Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem. The
suppression of death. Expectation of the Golden
Age as “pie in the sky”. The unanswered question
of legitimation (“How do you know that?”). Success
of “plans” worse than their failure?
V. The Great Banquet 77
The demand imposed by belief in revealed historical
prophecy. Eschatology and apocalypticism. Every¬
thing false if the underlying belief is wrong. No
continual progress towards perfection. “Passing from
time to eternity” (Kant). Not simply the “victory
of reason”. “The lie has been made the world order”
(Kafka). The last word of the apocalyptic prophecy:
New Heaven, New Earth. The “Great Banquet”
and spes implicita. The indefinableness of what is
hoped for.
Notes qc
8
QUI
MAGNI AD CONVIVII SPEM
ALACRIUS NOS PRAECURRIT
DILECTO FILIO
PIAM IN MEMORIAM
What does Hope Mean?
In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the decade
of the French Revolution, that is, someone raised and
attempted to answer the question: Whether the Human
Race is Continually Advancing towards the Better. This
someone was Immanuel Kant.1
Kant considers the thesis very much in terms of prin¬
ciple. He allows himself no preconceptions; or so it seems,
at any rate. Regarded in purely abstract terms, he says,
there are three possible ways to answer the question. First,
“continual ascent”; second, “continual decline”; third,
continuance on more or less the same level, remaining at
the same stage. Of these three possible answers, Kant
eliminates one immediately, from the start, without dis¬
cussion: the second. To be sure, “retrogression to the
worse” (as he expresses it) is a theoretic possibility, but
in concreto it does not exist; to Kant it is simply incon-
HOPE AND HISTORY
ceivable. Why? His statement on the matter runs as
follows: “Deterioration cannot continue indefinitely in
the human race; for when that process reached a certain
pitch the race would annihilate itself.” In the Kantian
view the self-destruction of the human species cannot
even be considered by a realistic historical thinker; such a
thing can never happen.
Now in regard to this point a fundamental change has
occurred meanwhile, although only in the very recent
past. Fifty or even thirty years ago men could think they
were right to share Immanuel Kant’s conviction on this
score. Since Hiroshima that is no longer possible. Since
then the idea that mankind might annihilate itself is not
only merely conceivable, no longer something arguable;
it has become acute.
When we look back on Immanuel Kant’s position, we
cannot help recalling Kierkegaard’s bitter maxim that
the deceived are wiser than the undeceived. Perhaps, too,
it may seem unfair to quarrel with a man of the eighteenth
century from the superior standpoint of the “deceived”
and to criticize Kant, say, for a lack of insight or precision
in method. The self-extermination of man did actually
lie beyond the bounds of any real possibility in the
eighteenth century. From a purely technical point of
view, it could not be accomplished. Then was not Kant
right after all, on the basis of his historical assumptions?
I would say: he had good reasons, but he was not right.
After all, the nature of historical man has not changed
WHAT DOES HOPE MEAN?
since his day—indeed, not even since Adam (or since
Cain)! No doubt it was easier for Kant than for us today
to cherish illusions about the potentialities hidden in his¬
torical man, the things man is capable of; but it remains
an illusion, an error, all the same. Nowadays other errors
about man probably come easy to us; but at least we are
immune to this particular Kantian error. We would simply
not have the temerity, if confronted with the three possi¬
bilities for the course of history as formulated by Kant, to
exclude the negative one a priori.
This has been confirmed countless times in the topical,
historical, philosophical and sociological writings of the
past few decades, and wherever anyone attempts to assess
our present world situation. “Man’s existence now, and
for the first time, is threatened”—these are the opening
words of a paper delivered at the scholarly international
London symposium (of 1962) on the future of man2—a
future which in most other respects the participants tended
to view optimistically. And of course the most startling
fact is precisely the technical one: that man can achieve
self-annihilation by the weapons he himself has created.
The fact can no longer be set aside. Robert Oppenheimer
says: “No world has ever faced a possibility of destruc¬
tion—in a relevant sense annihilation—comparable to
that which we face, nor a process of decision-making
even remotely like that which is involved in this.”3
Another well founded diagnosis of our historical situa¬
tion is contained in the sentence: “We are the first men
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HOPE AND HISTORY
who control the apocalypse.” It is, of course, rather dubi¬
ous phraseology to say that men “control the apocalypse”;4
but the meaning behind these words is perfectly clear, I
should think. At any rate here is another reminder that
anyone investigating the historical future of man cannot
exclude the possibility of total catastrophe. This in itself
intensifies the difficulties of the investigation, since the
investigator can no longer indulge himself in what we
might call “academic” unconcern—as though there were
plenty of time to think the problem out first, from the
ground up, and only then approach the matter of solutions.
“These are not long-term problems”—this was said re¬
peatedly at the above-mentioned London symposium.5
Konrad Lorenz remarks that one can scarcely prophesy “a
long life” for man, not if one observes him “as he stands
today, in his hand the hydrogen bomb with which his
reason has presented him, in his heart . . . the aggressive
instinct which said reason is unable to dominate”. In¬
cidentally, this statement comes from a book whose title
is The Hopes of Our Time.6
Here, then, almost like a challenge, we encounter one
of the two key words which we have linked together, the
theme of our discussion being “hope and history”. What¬
ever else may be implied by this formulation, it is at any
rate clear from the start what enormous relevance the
mere association of these two concepts has in the present
situation. Here, too, we might say “for the first time”.
Never before, it would seem, has the question of the mean-
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