“Men sustained with courage and hope”

“It is a question of learning hope.”
(Ernst Bloch)¹

Hope is fundamental to what makes us human. Without it, we could not exist. Christianity taught hope as a virtue. But it did not invent hope. People have hoped throughout history.

Giovanni Maio’s essay, “Therapieziel Hoffnung. Zur Bedeutung der Hoffnung in einer technisierten Medizin” (Hope as a therapeutic goal: On the significance of hope in an engineered medicine), provides an inducement to hope for this power inherent in human nature. This “movingly wonderful” essay, as a colleague described it to me, deserves much discussion. For its profound thoughts extend far beyond the meaning of hope for the suffering, the sick, and the dying, and ask us: “What does hope mean in our time?”2 Giovanni Maio begins with the fundamental idea:

“We can only hope concretely if we are sustained by a fundamental hope.” […] Thus, man chooses his everyday hopes on the ground of the hope that sustains and guides him.”³

In 1979, my father gave me a copy of Ernst Bloch’s three-volume work “The Principle of Hope” for my birthday. On the inside of the first volume, I read in his handwriting, “Page 83, bottom: What hope is.” He wanted to encourage his son. “Hope”, says Bloch at this point, underlined by my father,

“this expectant counter-emotion against anxiety and fear, is therefore the most human of all mental feelings and only accessible to men, and it also refers to the furthest and brightest horizon.”⁴

And then Bloch quotes that almost somewhat un-Marxist-sounding thought written by Marx:

“A spider carries out operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts many human builders to shame with the building of its wax cells. But what distinguishes the worst builder from the best bee from the outset, is that he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax, at the end of the work process there is a result which already existed in the imagination of the worker at the beginning of that process, i.e. already existed ideally.”⁵ 
    Man as builder “realises his purpose in the natural world, a purpose he knows.”⁶

In all areas of life, as Bloch interprets this idea, man must have “planned the plan himself” and then “anticipated the realisation of his plan as a brilliant, even decisively inspiring dream onwards.”⁷ Unlike the bee, man can and must “look forward” through planning.

“And precisely at this point there is formed that which […] activates and galvanises us towards the goal of a better life: daydreams are formed. They always come from a feeling of something lacking […], they are all dreams of a better life. […] among them base, dubious, dismal, merely enervating escapist dreams […] with approval and support of the status quo; […] But how many other wishful daydreams have sustained men with courage and hope, not by looking away from the real, but, on the contrary, by looking into its progress, into its horizon.”⁸

In this way, man “extends” his life into the future through planning. And he envisions something which is a “Not-Yet-Conscious,” something, that has never existed before that no one has ever thought in the past: “a forward dawning, into the New.” This premonition of a new future already surrounds the simplest daydreams; “from there it extends into further areas of negated deprivation, and hence of hope.”⁹ 

One could argue at length and utterly fruitlessly about why Bloch, as a Marxist, writes about the Christian virtue of hope, when Marx dismissed religion as “the opium of the masses”. Something far more important must be emphasised: Ernst Bloch wrote “The Principle of Hope” between 1938 and 1947 in American exile and published it in 1959. More than half a century later, we read the following sentences, which so strikingly resemble the thoughts of the Marxist Ernst Bloch, in the Christian Giovanni Maio’s remarkable essay “Hope as a Therapeutic Goal”:

“Hope is not a gushing disregard of reality, but rather the acknowledgment of reality; it is fundamentally reason-oriented because it clearly recognises the deficiencies of the present. Hope is characterised by the fact that it does not gloss over adverse reality, but rather affirms it; it acknowledges it, but does not allow itself to be overwhelmed by it. Hope implies the ability to simultaneously perceive a potentiality within the present reality. He who hopes sees […] the possibility still inherent in adversity. […] the hopeful person is the one who sees clearly, who creates perspectives for himself.”¹⁰

“While those who despair reduce the present to the not-yet and thus narrow their gaze solely to the pure present, remaining trapped in the present, those who are hopeful are equally able to recognise the deficiencies of the present, but see through these deficiencies the fundamental possibility of what is good.”¹¹
    Why do a Marxist and a Christian meet at the same point when they talk about hope? Because it is the point that can spiritually unite all “who bear a human face” (Alphonse Daudet) as equals. It makes hope something that far surpasses optimism: certainty about the essence of humanity – about his nature, his being God’s creature, or whatever words we choose. It is the moral and legal certainty expressed in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which for the first time categorically demanded for all people:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Today, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is part of customary international law. And yet, a person lacking hope who follows contemporary history could easily go mad. One shudders to think what horrific caricatures people can become when megalomaniacal, consumed by hatred, greed, and a thirst for power; when they lose all touch with reality; when they see other people merely as a means to an end; when they become unscrupulous genocidal murderers who, in the name of some supposedly superior being, view others as “cattle” and slaughter them en masse; who behave like lunatics and, emotionally cold, are also intellectually incapable of considering whether others might actually also be right for once.
    In this “Western” world, to which we belong whether we like it or not, little remains of what was once considered among the best features of European culture.
    And yet, only 5–10 per cent of the international financial and power elites are capable of the excesses I have just described. The vast majority of humans work, love their families and children, want no war, no torture, none of the madness that assaults them daily. But they are trapped in the irrational fear of fabricated threats, which is being instilled in them daily.
    Perhaps the only thing that can sustain us spiritually, regardless of our religion or view of the world, is this certainty: that with every newborn child, new, “untwisted” life comes into the world, not yet trapped in the madness of our Western culture. Looking at these children, the hopeful can see that truly, man is entirely different.
    Let us consider the following experiment. A 12-month-old child, while playing, watches an adult working on documents. It is agreed that no one will speak. After a while, the adult leaves the room. A second adult enters, puts away the first adult’s documents, and leaves. The first adult returns after a while and looks for his documents. The child sees this and points to the spot on the shelf where the item is located. Once the adult understands, the child stops pointing.¹² The child cannot yet speak or walk upright. But it already understands this pointing gesture and its meaning.¹³ 
    What has happened? The child connects mentally with the adult and grasps what is going on within him; it understands his intention. It recognises the other human as being of the same essence (equality) and helps, not because the other is a beloved relative – he is, after all, a stranger – but because it perceives this other person as a fellow human being whom it will help spontaneously and of its own free will (freedom), and not because it has been asked or will be rewarded. It is not a cost-benefit maximiser. This is a voluntary, spontaneous (intrinsic) action. The child helps because it recognises what the other person needs. It mentally puts itself in the adult’s position and grasps his intention. It connects mentally with this person and his intention. And: it does all this willingly; joyfully. A shared focus on the same intention arises (fraternity). Liberty, equality, fraternity are at the beginning of life. It is a behaviour that all children exhibit around the end of their first year, even before they can speak and think rationally.
    Michael Tomasello calls this process “cultural intelligence” or “shared intentionality.” It is the ability

“to pursue common intentions together with others and make commitments in cooperative endeavours. These shared intentions and commitments are shaped by shared attention and mutual knowledge and are based on the cooperative motives of helping others and sharing things with them.”¹⁴ 

This form of giving assistance is unique to humans, and it is important to emphasise that it does not depend on language: children inform others through pointing gestures. This behaviour does not need to be taught to them. It “emerges quite naturally,” namely,

“from about their first birthday –when they begin to walk and talk […]. However, as they develop further, this relatively uninhibited willingness to cooperate is modified by various influences.”¹⁵ 

Lying, that is, a refusal to cooperate,

“emerges only a few years later and presupposes prior trust and willingness to cooperate. If people did not assume they could rely on the helpfulness of others, lies would not achieve their objective in the first place.”¹⁶ 

This is what we humans are like at the beginning of our life. This is what we are like by nature. How far removed is this radiant beginning of life from the mental state of the megalomaniacs, warmongers, liars, self-righteous, criminals, and murderers? What must happen to our beloved children for those one-year-olds, who can already experience liberty, equality, and fraternity as emotional qualities at a pre-verbal age, to later acquire characters completely alienated from their nature? What would have to happen to make humanity live like the above-mentioned one-year-old one day? We all were this one-year-old once! If humanity did not destroy itself under the dictates of the insane, if we had the time and freedom to develop…
    In reality, as the personal human sciences reveal we humans are really completely different from the large number of well-paid intellectuals with the right party affiliation who have worked their way up to the spheres of “state philosophers,” “master thinkers,” Nobel laureates, dignitaries, and recipients of awards and honours. They are handpicked, promoted, and elevated to expert panels and advisory positions, from where they supply those 5–10 per cent already mentioned with all the millions of false theories about humanity that become the opium of the masses.
    Over the past 150 years, representatives of the personalistic schools of thought in history, psychology, education, psychiatry, anthropology, and any other human sciences, have produced an overwhelming wealth of knowledge, insights, and skills. Taken together, they reveal how and why one-year-olds, who can already experience liberty, equality, and fraternity as emotional qualities at a pre-verbal stage, later develop into characters who live completely alienated from their nature.
    This certainty that humankind is different. Completely different! This is the hope, the daydream, that we dream in the Blochian sense, as if humanity were eternal: sub specie aeternitatis, as Alfred Adler said.
    This hope is aware of human nature and of a really possible state of humanity, which subtly shimmers and beams from the behaviour of the one-year-olds and proves to us: This could always be the reality. Ernst Bloch therefore calls this a “learned hope,” a “docta spes.” It defies Western folly – which is not humanity as it truly is by nature. We are, indeed, completely different.  •

¹   Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. (Studies in contemporary German social thought) Vol. 1. Third printing, 1996, First MIT Press paperback edition, 1995 (ISBN 0-262-52199-7), Introduction.
²   Maio, Giovanni. “Therapieziel Hoffnung. Zur Bedeutung der Hoffnung in einer technisierten Medizin (Hope as a Therapeutic Goal: On the Significance of Hope in a Technologised Medicine).” In: Zeitschrift für medizinische Ethik (Journal of Medical Ethics) 61 (2015), pp. 257–269
³   ibid., p. 258
⁴   Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1; Third printing, 1996, First MIT Press paperback edition, 1995, p. 75f.
⁵   Marx, Karl. Das Kapital (Capital), Vol. I, 1947 in: Bloch 1996, p. 127, p. 186
⁶   ibid.
⁷   Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. p 76
⁸   ibid.
⁹   ibid. p. 77
¹⁰ Maio, Giovanni. “Therapieziel Hoffnung. Zur Bedeutung der Hoffnung in einer technisierten Medizin (Hope as a Therapeutic Goal: On the Significance of Hope in a Technologised Medicine).” In: Journal of Medical Ethics 61 (2015), p. 259
¹¹ ibid., p. 263
¹² Lizskowski, U.; Carpenter, M.; Tomasello, M. (2006): “12- and 18-month-olds point to provide information for others.” In: Journal of Cognition and Development 7, pp. 173–187
¹³ Behne, T.; Carpenter, M.; Tomasello, M. (2005): One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions behind gestures in a hiding game. In: Developmental Science 8, pp. 492–499
¹⁴ Tomasello, Michael: Warum wir kooperieren (Why We Cooperate). Frankfurt/Main 2010, pp. 11–12.
¹⁵ ibid., p. 19
¹⁶ ibid., p. 31