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. 7 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 15 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- 16