The Loss of Hope

James E. Faulconer

Department of Philosophy, Brigham Young University

            Hopelessness is a feature of our age, as to one degree or another it has been of all ages. We use the term “hopeless” less often than we once might have, and today the related medieval term acedia is all but unknown, though it was once the subject of important discussions. But we do speak of such things as angst, depression, and lassitude, and all of these speak of the loss of hope. What is the structure of that loss? How are we to think hopelessness?

             Beginning at least with Augustine, Christian philosophers reflected on hope and its loss, but those reflections have had little effect on contemporary discussions. It is easy to understand why: in traditional Christian thought, hope is a theological virtue (the ultimate object of hope is God) and loss of hope is a mortal sin (the rejection of God). With good reason we no longer discuss theological virtues and mortal sins outside of homilies and courses in theology. The contemporary absence of philosophical discussions of hope and hopelessness is at least partly a reflection of the secularization of the West. I suspect, however, that our failure to talk about hope and hopelessness may be a consequence of the overweening confidence we have inherited from our Enlightenment predecessors. Surely, however, the twentieth century has given us reason to question that confidence.

            I will begin with a brief phenomenology of hope, since that phenomenology will permit me then to discuss the loss of hope. I will not confine my phenomenology to the observations of Christian thinkers. On the contrary, I will criticize their understanding on at least one point: they understand hope as an orientation toward the future though I take it instead to be an orientation toward our finitude. Thus I will allow my phenomenology to be guided by their thoughts, though often silently and never completely. Given the history of thought about hope and hopelessness, it is appropriate that any retrieval of hopelessness include a re-examination of relevant Christian thinking. Even if we no longer hold to the religious views of those thinkers, they are likely to have much to tell us about the structure of hope and hopelessness.

            The first thing to notice about hope is that it is a state of belief. I live in the desert of the American West, where we are in the fifth year of a severe drought. As a consequence I often hope for rain. It is impossible to say that I hope for rain but I do not believe it is possible. At the same time, it is equally impossible to hope for rain if I am certain that it will rain. Hope is for something that is possible but not certain.

            Of course, to hope for something is not to insist that it is real when it is not, for hope knows that what it hopes for is, to some degree, subjectively improbable: if I hope that it will rain tomorrow, I recognize that what I hope for is not certain. I don’t deny the improbability of what I hope for; as I will argue, I may even expect nothing more than what is probable, in this case continued dry weather, though I hope for rain. Hope and expectation are not the same. He who hopes does not confuse his hopes with certainties or realities. It follows that the self-deceiver does not hope, for he insists on the certainty of that for which he claims to hope, while the hopeful person recognizes the possibility that her hope will not be fulfilled. Hope for the impossible is, at best, false hope and, at worst, self-deception. A young man who hopes to marry the present queen of France has false hope. His friend who hopes to marry a beautiful actress is probably going to experience disappointed hope.

            What about something that I expect? Can I hope for that? In other words, can I only hope for the improbable? Suppose I expect to wake up tomorrow morning. Can I also hope to wake up? Under normal conditions for healthy people, “I hope I wake up tomorrow morning” seems to make little sense. I do not hope to wake up, because I am sure I will. I do not hope for what I expect. As a result, it seems that hope and expectation differ precisely in that expectation is always a matter of high probability—or even certitude—but that is not true of hope. At first glance, hope seems always to be for something improbable. But what about other cases, such as “I hope the basketball team wins tomorrow night,” when they are playing a team that I reasonably believe they will beat? Is that a real hope or is it just a way of speaking? Is it really true that I cannot hope for what is probable? I think not.

            I take it that hoping for the basketball team to win when I expect them to win shows that hope is a recognition that things do not always go as we reasonably expect them to. It is as if I say, “I expect the team to win because I believe they will and I have good reasons for my belief. Nevertheless, I know that there is always a chance that they will not and, in the face of that possibility, I hope they will win.” Such cases are interesting because they show that hope is a recognition of improbability, regardless of degree. The improbability that I recognize need not be greater than the probability—though it often and perhaps usually, is—but if I hope, I recognize that what I hope for is, to some degree or in some sense, improbable. Hope focuses on the improbability of an event, though it may also recognize its probability; expectation has its focus on probability and takes the improbability to be relatively unimportant, even to the point of ignoring it.

            It also seems that hope is always for a good. Of course, there is a sense in which I can hope for what is bad—and I may recognize that it is bad. We can imagine an angry person sincerely saying, “I ought not to kill the pet of another person, but I hope that, when the poison arrives by mail, I will still want to kill my neighbor’s barking dog.” In spite of recognizing that his desire is in some sense bad, such a person sees the death of his neighbor’s dog as something desirable—as a good even if not the good.

            We can say, then, that structurally hope is a kind of virtue, in the Greek sense, an existential commitment to the possibility of a good that recognizes a degree of improbability of that good. At the same time, hope is a species of humility, for hope is always a recognition that the good I hope for is ultimately beyond my control. I hope because I am a finite being; an infinitely powerful being cannot hope. That hope is a recognition of our finitude will turn out to be the key to our understanding of the loss of hope.

            Christianity has described hope’s orientation to the good by describing human being as status viatoris, “being-underway,” rather than status comprehensor, “having reached one’s destination” (Pieper 11-12). To hope is to be oriented toward a good that has not arrived; to be human is to be in motion, to be no-longer and not-yet. Because Christian philosophers have understood hope as status viatoris, being underway toward what is not-yet, they have naturally spoken of hope as future-oriented. (See Thomas, II.II.161.1, and Bloch, 11.) As a result, Josef Pieper, following the tradition, describes natural hope as a function of youth: the young have a longer future than the old, so they can be more hopeful (43; see also Thomas I.II.40.1). The past seems over and done and, so, no longer a region of possibility. Only the future seems possible. This means that statements like “I hope I didn’t break my leg” must be explained as future-oriented even though they appear, at first glance, to be oriented to the past. If I hope that I didn’t break my leg, I know that it is already broken or it is not, but I hope it will turn out that it is not. For those who believe that hope is necessarily future-oriented, such a hope is not so much about the status of my leg as it is about what I will in the future learn about what has already happened.

            But we cannot adequately explain hope epistemically. Consider other cases that make it difficult to insist on the future orientation of hope. For example, how can I hope that my friend did not suffer when she died, or what sense are we to make of a parent’s response, “I should hope not,” when a child brags, “I didn’t cheat on the examination”? It is unreasonable to insist that hopes like these express desires that I will some day find out that she didn’t suffer or that he didn’t cheat. My hope is clearly for a state of affairs that obtained in the past or should have obtained in the past, regardless of what I will or will not find out about that state of affairs. Hope is not necessarily a desire to know something nor is it necessarily future-oriented.

            Why, then, is hope so commonly described as future-oriented? Presumably because of its focus on possibility and our assumption that possibility is a matter of the future. However, from a Heideggerian perspective the past, too, must be understood in terms of possibility. Since my topic is not the Heideggerian theory of time, I will not go into detail defending that claim, though I can briefly outline the argument. Consider Heidegger’s discussion of having-been as repetition (Weiderholung—SuZ 338-39), with its clear but implicit reference to Kierkegaard’s little book, Repetition: if we understand what has been as a determinate given, as no longer possible, then we cannot truly understand what it means to repeat what has happened before. The concept of genuine repetition, doing what has been done before, requires that the past be understood in terms of possibility. If I do what another did in the past, either I merely imitate what he did—which is not what he did—or I do something else that genuinely repeats what he did. Kierkegaard’s question is, How is genuine repetition rather than mere imitation possible?

            Heidegger’s response to that question is his understanding of temporality: genuine repetition is only possible if the past is not only something given, but also something open. For ordinary understanding, we are in time: we have a determinate past that has created the present and, within that present, we await the future. Just as the past consists of a set of possibilities that have come to pass and are now over-and-done, finished, the present is the set of possibilities that are present-at-hand, and the future consists of a determinate set of possibilities that will yet come to pass, the possibilities that we await. In each case, however, ordinary understanding takes the past, present, and future to be a set of determinate beings within a temporal flow.

            However, even if the set of future possibilities is infinite, as a set (in other words, as something defined or determined) it does not have openness as such, though it is something capable of many determinations, perhaps an infinite number of them. The only difference between the future and the past is that the past is a set in which the possibilities have been concluded (have been decided) and the possibilities of the future have yet to be concluded, though what they can be is already given, even if not known or knowable.

            As evidence for my claim about how we usually think about possibility, consider the way that religious people have almost always thought about divine foreknowledge: the future exists in some determinate form, so God can know it though we cannot. Even if the future exists as a set of possibilities, all of which God knows, it exists in a determinate form: these possibilities rather than some other. Given the influence of Christian philosophy, we continue to think in those terms, even if we do not believe in that God. Thus, ordinary understanding thinks time in terms of degrees of determination rather than in terms of genuine possibility or openness. But Heidegger argues that we should understand our relation to time as a relation to openness rather than to some degree of determination.

            That conclusion goes so much against common sense that it sounds ridiculous. What can we make of the claim that the past is open that doesn’t justify the Thracian maiden’s charge that philosophy is useless star-gazing? I was born in 1947. That is a fact that cannot change. I cannot choose to have been born at another time nor can events bring it about that I was born at some other time. If not, however, what sense does it make to say that past events are open? In a pregnant sentence from “Der Spruch des Anaximander” Heidegger speaks of the openness of the past, saying “We must learn today to think the former out of what is here” (302). The openness of the past as a phenomenon is its existence in the present, and it exists in the present as what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls Wirkungsgeschichtlichebewußtsein, our consciousness (explicit or otherwise) of the effects of the past—or what I will call here “significance.” The more we ascribe no significance to an event, the less it makes sense to speak of that phenomenon as an event. It is meaningless to speak of a phenomenal event with absolutely no significance. This means that the significance of an event is not something simply added to it, as if the event exists apart from all significance and then we attach significance to it. Thus Heidegger’s answer to Kierkegaard’s question is that genuine repetition repeats the significance of the event, something possible only if the past remains open as to its significance. To repeat what someone did in the past is to signify in the same way.

            Heidegger’s understanding of time does not change the description I gave earlier of hope: (1) it has belief as a component; (2) in hope one recognizes the possibility of a good toward which one moves; one also recognizes that (3) the good one approaches is, to some degree, improbable and (4) that good is not fully in one’s power, if at all. However, Heidegger’s understanding does change our understanding of the second criterion by showing us the need to rethink possibility: hope is an orientation to possibility, to the openness of events, rather than to the future. Notice, however, that this rethinking of the second criterion allows us to see that the second and the fourth criteria overlap: to be oriented to possibility as such and, so, to the openness of the past as well as the openness of the present and future is to be oriented to my finitude. To say, “I hope that my friend did not suffer when she died,” is to recognize that I do not know that she did not. My present desire for the good in the past is interrupted, though I nevertheless continue to desire it as a possible past in the present. I am finite and my finitude makes hope possible. Given the openness of the past in the present, in hope I recognize that openness and, at the same time, imagine and desire a good in it.

            It is important to understand being interrupted in terms of my earlier discussion of openness rather than in traditional terms of not having access to some existing potentiality. I am not a finite being because a determinate possibility exists but something prevents me from knowing it (the assumption that grounds the explanation of mere epistemic hope). I am a finite being because the world is open, because there is genuine indeterminateness, possibility, or openness in things, and that openness can only occur within the limits of my existence as a subject. The world is not open to an infinite being, the god of metaphysics. For such a being, there is nothing more than what is, nothing beyond the given, nothing that can interrupt the omniscient god. A being absolutely determined in a world with no openness would seem, at first glance, to be exactly the opposite of an infinite being. But such cannot be said to be limited any more than can the God who lives outside the world, for limitation requires something beyond the limit and there is nothing beyond for in an absolutely determined world. There is openness for neither of these beings and, so, there is also no limitation—neither restraint nor something otherwise—for either. Both are infinite, though the way each is infinite is quite different than the way the other is infinite. Hope requires openness, but openness is concomitant with finitude, with interruption.

            Understanding hope as an orientation to possibility/finitude/interruption rather than the future is unlikely to change drastically the traditional Christian understanding of hope. Thinkers like Pieper speak of the new life that Christian rebirth brings as a new youthfulness, but they could equally well understand it in terms of new possibilities, or in terms of re-newed possibilities. One finds a similar connection of youthfulness and renewed possibilities rather than a renewed future in contemporary thought:

[Internal time] characterizes a sequence of states of a system insofar as it undergoes continuing cycles of non-identical reproduction. [. . .] As long as this movement goes one, we may say that the system remains “young.” Being young, then, is not a result of being located near zero on the time scale; it is a function—if you will—of the very functioning of the system. The age of the system is measured by its capacity to produce differences that count as unprecedented and keep the machinery going. (Rheinberger 180)

Nevertheless, understanding hope as an orientation toward possibility—toward interruption—rather than as a kind of givenness is not a minor shift in understanding.

            Let me make one more brief excursion before, finally, coming to the theme of this paper, the loss of hope. Without the openness of the world, hope is not possible. It follows that hope is more than a psychological attitude, though thus far I have spoken of it only psychologically. Hope is not only a psychological attitude, for the psychological attitude has its ground in a way of being in the world. Any particular hope is a manifestation of the hopeful way of being-in-the-world. Thus, to understand hope, we must understand what it means to be in the world, to be oriented.

            Heidegger’s term, Stimmung (translated as “attunement” or “mood”) helps us understand that orientation. As Heidegger uses the term, mood is “a fundamental existentiale” (134), a basic character or structure of the human way of being. It is the way we find ourselves in the world, already attuned to it in some particular way. In a mood the world opens to us in one way rather than another, revealing it as a place for this rather than that.

            Perhaps Heidegger’s best-known explication of mood is in “Was ist Metaphysik?” There he begins by reminding us that omniscience is impossible; it is impossible to comprehend the totality of beings in themselves. Nevertheless, though such comprehension is impossible, we always find ourselves in the midst of beings that are revealed as a whole (“Metaphysik” 110). I always find myself in a world of things, and that world is one rather than fragmented. How do we account for the unity of our experience? We do not, in Lockean fashion, make things into a whole out of parts that we encounter and then put together, for we only encounter parts within a pre-existing whole. We do not see a set of color patches and construct our world from it. Rather, from the beginning we see things—trees, animals, buildings, persons—in the world, as part of and in relation to a whole. No explanation of the wholeness of the world will do if it attributes that wholeness to the mind and its constructions, for such a creation would have to be ex nihilo. Instead we find ourselves always already in a world, in a whole.

            Mood is Heidegger’s answer to the question of how we encounter the unity of the world. Mood is a fundamental way of being for Dasein, and boredom is an important example of mood. In boredom we are indifferent to things as a whole, but in that very indifference we encounter them and we encounter them as a whole. Joy is another, quite different mood. To the joyful person everything is different than it is when he is not joyful: joy also reveals beings as a whole. Moods like joy and boredom are ways of being in the world, but they are not ways of being that we construct. In fact, we find ourselves in them. I find myself bored. I find myself joyful. And finding myself in a mood, I am oriented in the world differently; it appears as a whole with a particular character, the character that the mood I find myself in gives it, the wholeness that my mood gives it. Thus, to be bored is to find oneself among things and oriented to them as a whole but indifferently. In contrast, in joy we find ourselves in the world and the things of the world as a place of well-being.

            According to Heidegger, this finding-ourselves (Befindlichkeit) in which beings are revealed as a whole shows that human beings are fundamentally relational, but their relations to the world have their character from out of the moods in which they find themselves. Heidegger’s argument is that since moods are ways of revealing beings as a whole, they conceal what seems to be their opposite, the nothing. We can ask ourselves whether there is, perhaps, some mood that reveals the nothing rather than conceals it, and Heidegger’s answer is yes: Angst. In angst we find ourselves oriented to the whole of beings as something slipping away, as something that we cannot get hold of. This slipping away of beings allows us to see that moods are not ways in which we grasp or comprehend beings, as a whole or otherwise. Angst is angst precisely because it is an orientation to the nothing, something we cannot grasp, so mood is not intentional. Moods have no objects. Instead, we are oriented to the world by them, and in angst, we are oriented to the world as nothing.

            How are we to understand the nothingness of the world toward which angst is oriented? Ought we to charge Heidegger with nihilism because he argues that we are fundamentally oriented to the nothing? No. In “Was ist Metaphysik?” Heidegger makes it clear that the nothing is not the nihilation of beings. Instead, the nothing makes itself known in beings as “a slipping away of the whole” (113). We discover that though we always find ourselves in the midst of beings that are revealed as a whole, that wholeness is not stable (114). And why is it not stable? Because it is not the product of a metaphysical, fundamental Entity or Being. Our encounter with the world is, at root, an encounter with the openness of the world; our experience of the nothingness of the world discloses “beings in their [. . ] strangeness as the radically other—rather than nothing.” Tellingly, Heidegger remarks that angst reveals “the original openness of beings” (114, my italics) and, so, the instability of any particular determination of beings as a whole. In angst we discover that the wholeness of the world has its origin in the interruption of our ability to comprehend the whole, in orientation to the openness of the world.

            Heidegger shows us that mood is an orientation in the world, a way of revealing beings, a way of being-underway. Mood outlines in advance how beings can matter to Dasein (SuZ 137), what significances they have. On that view, hopefulness is a mood, a mood in which I find myself as a finite being oriented to the world that is open to the good. Hopefulness gives significances to the things of the world, ways of being open to the good. What, then, of the loss of hope?

            Our earlier description of hope makes it possible to offer a preliminary description of the loss of hope: the loss of hope is an orientation to the good in which I experience the good as impossible. In hope I come up against my finitude—I am and will be neither omniscient nor omnipotent—but I continue to be oriented to that good and to see the world as open to it, however improbable. When I lose hope, I no longer see the world as open to the good though I continue to desire it. Ironically, when I lose hope, I experience myself no longer as a finite being though I long to be one.

            As we have seen, I can cease to be finite in two ways that turn out to be the same insofar as there is no possibility in either: I can be a human being locked in a world without possibility, or I can be a god for whom everything is actual. In Also Sprach Zarathustra Nietzsche reminds us that the highest hope of philosophical will was to create a world before which we can kneel (KSA 4.146), to make a world completely transparent to our gaze and understanding. For a long time (in certain ways since its beginning), much philosophy aimed at God’s knowledge, not understanding that in aiming at determinate knowledge of a determinate world it was also aiming at the oblivion of possibility. Until well into the nineteenth century, the history of philosophy, the history of Christianity, and the history of science shared their insistence on ultimate determinacy. They shared that insistence because they were part of what Heidegger, learning from Nietzsche, called “the history of metaphysics”: there exists an ultimate being—whether Plato’s Forms, Christianity’s God, the Enlightenment’s Reason, or Hegel’s Absolute Spirit; that ultimate Being is the ground of the world; and our goal is to know/imitate/be-one-with it. In spite of the challenges to metaphysics that began at least with Romanticism and continue today, the metaphysical view continues to dominate us culturally. In the metaphysical world, I can become a god or I can be the oppressed victim of a god, but real hope is impossible in either case. The only hope possible is for the victim of a god, and that hope is only epistemic, one a sign of his oppression.

            In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch discusses the problem of metaphysics in a way that sheds light on our understanding of hope and the loss of hope. He argues that if essence is already given—a determinate though not yet actualized potentiality—then actual being is always something unfinished and deficient rather than something possible and open (18, among other places). If essence is already given, we are underway only toward the renewal or actualization of the past, toward what has already been given. Anything less than what has already been given is mere deficiency, and the actual is always less than what is essentially given. Conversely, if actual being is understood as open rather than deficient, then we cannot understand essence as already given, not even as potentiality. Only if essence is not already given is it possible for us to be underway. According to Bloch, a notion of hope—of openness, of possibility—is central to any attempt to understand the world and human existence that does not assume, with the tradition, that existence is deficiency. In act—actually—a world of mere potentiality, a world in which change is only apparent because it is only the fulfilment of already given essences, is a deficient world; ideally, it is an absolutely determined world. It is, therefore, also a world in which hope is impossible. Hope is possible only for those who seek utopia—the not-given— not for those who languish in nostalgia for a Edenic past, the already-given.

            Today we think that we seek utopia. We find ourselves in a world and we seek to make it determinate. We buy books that tell us how to raise our children and how to have better marriages. We assume that if only we had the right techniques we could be slim and beautiful our entire lives. We look to medical doctors to save us from ourselves as well as from natural illness and decay. We may not yet have found the fountain of youth, but we are sure that it is only a matter of time until we will. Seeing our lives as defined by mere potentialities (rather than given by possibilities), we take the world we live in to be deficient, but because we understand possibility in terms of potentiality rather than openness, we cannot hope to remedy that deficiency. Our world is either deficient or determinate. There is no other alternative; it contains no real possibility. What passes for utopianism is really only metaphysical nostalgia.

            But it is not enough to understand the loss of hope as the loss of possibility, for it shares that loss with boredom. More importantly, the loss of hope is also the experience of the good as the impossible. It is not just absent. In the loss of hope, the good looms before us as the impossible possible. When we lose hope, we are conflicted beings. We live in a world in which there is no possibility because we continue to insist on metaphysics. Yet we remember the good. We are nostalgic for it and, so, understand hope only epistemically. We are at once metaphysical and straining for what is beyond metaphysics. Contemporary western culture is deeply hopeless because it elides openness. The good for which we are nostalgic is not a good for which we can hope, but it is the only good we can imagine.

            Nietzsche was the backward-looking prophet of our post-metaphysical experience : “‘Where is God?’ he cried. ‘I will tell you. We have murdered him—you and I. All of us are his murders. But how have we done that? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon?’” (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, KSA 3.481). We have murdered the metaphysical god, but he has not disappeared. As Nietzsche also tells us, though the metaphysical god is dead, his corpse continues to stink.

            In his absence, then, what shall we do? As the fool in Nietzsche’s marketplace asks, “Mustn’t we ourselves become gods to seem worthy of it?” (KSA 3.481). Having murdered the metaphysical god, it seems that he can be replaced only by us. But how can we do that? It is difficult enough to understand how we drank the sea dry and obliterated the horizon that gave us our bearings in the world. It is even more difficult to know how we can replace them. Obviously the good is not something that we can construct ex nihilo. If it is only something that we determine as subjects, then it cannot mark our finitude. Instead of being finite beings who can hope, if we construct the good from out of our subjectivity, then we take ourselves to be in-finite beings and hope is impossible. Any real good must be beyond us; it must interrupt the horizon of our being, revealing our finitude and, so, making it possible for us to be underway to the good beyond that finitude, beyond being, beyond beings. The question of how the good is possible is the question of how we can be oriented toward what is beyond history. In a post-metaphysical age, how is it possible to be oriented to the good? That is perhaps the central question of contemporary philosophy. We long for the good and it seems impossible; our case seems hopeless.

            In an important sense, it is hopeless. I cannot comprehend a being that is absolutely beyond my subjectivity and my history, for that would require omniscience and I am finite. If I continue to insist that my relation to the good must be one of Cartesian or Kantian knowledge, then I must lose hope. But that kind of knowledge is not required for hope. Instead, what is required is an orientation to the good as it makes itself known in the world, not a comprehension of a good completely outside the world, outside my subjectivity and history. But how does something beyond the horizon of our worldly existence make itself known in the world? That question has been an important question in the history of philosophy for more than a thousand years, and for at least two hundred years the answer has been “It cannot.” That is, until recently.

            In both Kant and Husserl, a phenomenon must be understood within a horizon and according to an I. The result of this that an unconditioned phenomenon, pure transcendence, is impossible. Kant’s first Critique argues that experience is always experience of conditioned intuition. Thus, since whatever is absolutely transcendent is absolutely unconditioned, there can be no experience of it. Jean-Luc Marion responds to Kant by arguing that an unconditioned phenomenon is possible. His strategy is to argue for “saturated phenomena” rather than what we can describe as the “impoverished phenomena” of Kant (impoverished because they are constituted as phenomena by their horizon and subject, with relatively little or perhaps nothing given by intuition).

            The key to understanding Marion’s alternative is to remember that intuition is not, in itself, conditioned. Intuition is not reducible to its conditioning even if it never appears except as conditioned. Marion points out that his suggestion of the possibility of unconditioned phenomena is not as ridiculous as it may seem at first glance. After all, we find something like this even in Kant’s aesthetic, where the aesthetic idea is an intuition for which no adequate concept can be formed.

            In Kant’s aesthetic, the idea is impoverished, not the intuition, for the intuition gives too much to think. Kant says this excessiveness of intuition is “inexposable”; Marion uses, instead, the word invisible. The invisible phenomenon is “invisible, not by lack of light, but by excess of light” (197). The saturated phenomenon is invisible to the categories of understanding because it exceeds them. We don’t have to think that excess in terms of enormity. All that is necessary is that it be impossible to apply a successive synthesis to the phenomenon so that one can see the sum of its parts. The invisible is excessive of understanding because no successive synthesis is possible.

            However, in spite of the impossibility of performing a successive synthesis and, thereby, coming to a knowledge of the whole, Marion argues that it is possible to have an instantaneous synthesis of the saturated phenomenon, as in amazement and bedazzlement. We intend something when we are amazed or bedazzled, but it exceeds our understanding. What I see in the vision of the saturated phenomenon is not darkness, but something so bright that it blurs my vision, something I cannot see clearly.

            For Marion, we do not find amazement and bedazzlement only in the exceptional case. With Martin Heidegger, he believes that such experiences are the fundamental modes of our experience with the world and, so, determinative of phenomena. We can—indeed, must—“cover over” our amazement at and bedazzlement with things in order to get on in the world. I live most of my life as “one” lives life, shopping as one shops, for example. I do not look for some unique, authentic way for me to shop, perhaps refusing to use the check out counter as one does and, instead, taking my milk with me out the back door. To do so would be to shop in a way that may be authentically mine but, of course, is impossible to call shopping. What Heidegger calls inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) is not a moral category and it is certainly not something that I should always avoid. This covering-over is a way of proceeding that is not mine, that I’ve have been given by my history, culture, and context and it is necessary to my existence as a person among other persons. Nevertheless, the covering-over that comes to pass in ordinary life and experience is possible only on the basis of a “prior” encounter with things in which amazement and bedazzlement are essential. Marion’s way of saying this is to say that because the saturated phenomenon is always “disfigured” by the horizon(s) in which it appears and the knowing subject who apprehends it, it is not recognized as what it is. But even this disfiguring is a manifestation of the thing itself, prior to its conditioning in experience.

            Marion argues that because the experience of the saturated phenomenon is an experience of what I do not and cannot constitute, of what is excessive of understanding, it is an experience of my finitude and impotence. It is an experience in which I find myself constituted rather than constituting because I no longer have a dominant point of view over that which is intuited. Instead the intuition overwhelms me: “The I loses its anteriority and finds itself, so to speak, deprived of the duties of constitution, and is thus itself constituted: it becomes me rather than I” (211). I become a witness rather than a subject.

            For Marion’s critics, this is where the problem arises. According to Marion, since the intuition of a saturated phenomenon is an intuition in which the I is constituted as me, that intuition is a pure intuition of transcendence, one unmediated by concepts and without structure. But a pure intuition is, arguably, impossible. The idea of a pure intuition is the idea of an intuition with no content whatsoever; it is the idea of an experience to which no thought at all is attached, not just the experience of the overflow or excess of one’s concepts but an experience in which all concepts are absent. Not even witness is possible if that is the case. As thought-provoking as Marion’s analysis is, it goes too far. Quoting Marion, Dominique Janicaud asks, “What remains phenomenological in a reduction that, ‘properly speaking, is not,’ and refers back to a ‘point of reference [that is] all the more original and unconditioned as it is more restricted’?” (Tournant 48). Janicaud’s answer is pointed: nothing. A phenomenon requires that which makes it a phenomenon. It requires the ego, the I. A pure phenomenon is unintelligible.

            Does this mean that since there is no pure intuition of transcendence, every reference to transcendence remains trapped within the world of subject and object, remains constituted and, so, not at all a reference to transcendence? No. In spite of Marion’s problematic philosophical exuberance, he helps us see something: to deny that there are unconditioned phenomena is not to assert that there is never anything of the unconditioned in phenomena. Intuition does not disappear, and the evidence is that we experience the overflow of our concepts, the excess of intuition, in our affectivity, our incarnation. As mentioned, without reducing transcendence to a phenomenon and without arguing for pure intuition, Heidegger has already shown that transcendence is revealed in immanence. For example, he argues that the work of art reveals transcendence in immanence, revealing more than itself. We find that immanence and transcendence come together in at least the work of art.

            Of course, Heidegger is hardly the only philosopher to have dealt with this problem or to have argued that we experience transcendence in immanence. The problem is how to talk about those experiences, for at first glance, we seem unable to speak without speaking merely immanently and categorically. Our concepts are concepts of the phenomenal. How, then, can we use them to speak of what transcends the phenomenal, of overflow and excess, the unconditioned aspect of experience? This problem is an ancient one. Pseudo-Dionysus responds with negative theology. Plotinus speaks of the trace, a term that has been picked up and used in contemporary work, such as that of Lévinas and Derrida. Those in literature, such as Roland Barthes speak of subversion, a term that Marlène Zarader borrows. Finding a way to allow the subversion, interruption, supplementation, or tracing of the unconditioned to show itself in what we say is the “solution” to the problem. Though there are interesting and important differences between these thinkers of interruption and subversion, one can make the general observation that all such talk points to the fact that we always find ourselves in a world that we constitute and, at the same time, we find that something beyond the horizon disturbs both the horizon and the ego that implicitly claims to account completely for things and the world.

            In what do we find the transcendence of the good that will make hope possible? Traditionally the answer to that question is “God,” but what is beyond subjectivity and history cannot be the same as the metaphysical god. Using Bloch, I have already implicitly argued that by being an already given essence, the metaphysical god makes the world necessarily and eternally deficient and hopeless. He is not beyond the world; he is merely before it, its first mover to which it can never measure up and for which it always longs. Even life after death would not overcome the deficiency imputed to existence by the metaphysical god. But Christian hope contradicts Christian metaphysics (including Christian metaphysical explanations of hope), for it is not defined by its nostalgic hope for life after death (which is, after all, only a longer history, and not, therefore, essentially different than any other historically contingent hope). Instead, Christian hope is fulfilled in the Good that interrupts history. Christian hope is for the Good that shows itself by breaking through the veil of the e[scatwn, the limit—but a limit that is always there rather than a limit that will be revealed only in the future.

            Hope is not merely a matter of optimism, of predicting and expecting fulfillment. A person who has lost all hope can also be an optimist, as when a person seals his despair, the emptiness of his life, in his innermost being with work or a cause or laughter or . . . , allowing nothing of that emptiness to break out. Such optimism, a kind of tragic heroism, is considered a virtue, but real hope is not heroism. It is not a matter of gritting one’s teeth and expecting to succeed. Using Christian vocabulary, the truly hopeful person hopes not for good fortune, but for salvation or redemption, something that always remains awaited for and desired, that toward which, as a living, particular mortal being, one is always underway but that remains always not-given. This salvation, the “thing” awaited, is the arrival of the Good. The pain of the loss of hope is the pain of denying that the Good can interrupt my being. It is the pain found in our insistence that we are not finite.

            Nevertheless, if we think the e[scatwn only as an awaited interruption, only as futural—in Christian terms only as the awaited Apocalypse—then we can understand neither hope nor the loss of hope. Continuing to use Christian terms, we must think the interruption of the Good not just as Christ-who-is-to-come, but as Christ-with-us, as an event that occurs continually in our relation to a Person. With this Christianity suggests the answer to our questions, “What makes hope possible?” and “What does the loss of hope find impossible?”

            I think we find the answer, still inchoate, still not-yet, still underway in the work of Levinas and those today who continue to respond to him. Though Lévinas was, of course, no Christian and though he understood hope only as epistemic hope for the future, ultimately as hope for eternal life, perhaps no one has done more in contemporary philosophy to demonstrate our finitude and its implications for our relation to the good than Lévinas and those who continue to wrestle with the questions he raised and answers he posed. By doing so, by my lights, he has also given us the ground upon which we can build our understanding of hopefulness and the loss of hope: hopefulness is ethics, our interruption by the Other; the loss of hope is the experience of the “impossibility” of ethics, the impossibility of the face-to-face.

            We have discovered the Lévinasian face-to-face undergirding our descriptions of hope as an orientation toward the possibility of the good and the loss of hope as an orientation toward that good in which the good is impossible. As long as I remain outside myself, interrupted by the Other, hope remains possible. But when I collapse into myself, desiring the interruption of the good but closing off its possibility in my collapse, I lose hope. It remains to be seen what we can make of Lévinas’s insight. It especially remains to be seen what that insight means for our practical concerns. But Lévinas has already insisted that his understanding of ethics cannot remain merely theoretical:

Thanks be to God, we are not going preach sermons for dubious crusades to “link arms as believers,” to unite as “spiritualists,” against a growing materialism. [. . .] “Eating is important” says Rabbi Johanan in the name of Rabbi Jose b. Kisma (Sanhedrin 103b). The other person’s hunger—physical hunger, hunger for bread—is sacred; only the hunger of a third party limits its rights; there is no bad materialism but our own. (Difficile Liberté 10; my translation).

Though our culture has lost hope, continuing to live in a metaphysical world where hope for the Good is, at best, a nostalgic dream, we have reason to be hopeful, and many contemporary thinkers are bound with us in our orientation to that Good, in their attempts to understand how the Other interrupts our being.

Notes

Works Cited

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Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode

Han, Béatrice. “Transcendence and the Hermeneutic Circle: Some Thoughts on Marion and Heidegger.” In Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion. Edited by James E. Faulconer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. 120-144.

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit.

-----. “Der Spruch des Anaximander.”

-----. “Was ist Metaphysik?”

-----. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Edited by H-G Gadamer. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960.

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Lévinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988.

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Pieper, Josef. Über die Hoffnung. München: Kösel, 1949.

Rheiberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Vedder, Ben. “The Question into Meaning and the Question of God.” In Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion. Edited by James E. Faulconer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. 35-53.

Zarader, Marlène. “Phenomenality and Transcendence.” In Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion. Edited by James E. Faulconer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. 106-119.