Can hope remain meaningful or tangible even in the seeming “absence” of God?
Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch says Yes! Bloch defines hope as
“an urge to happiness, freedom, non-alienation, the golden age, the land of milk and honey, a perpetual ‘elsewhere’, the ‘new heavens and new earth’...and, above all, the ‘homeland’.”
As hope is rooted in “desire,” philosophers aplenty have wantonly
scoured among the crowd of desires for the “primary one”, the one that keeps history going and is powerful to overturn the structures of society.
Freud pegged such on the basis of sexual desire; Adler invokes will power; Jung pinpoints the vaguer need of intoxication; and others appeal to the need for self-preservation.
But for Bloch, the driving force or elementary energy of hope is hunger, both for the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Hunger is the source of constant improvement, a revolutionary force that makes necessary the ceaseless search for new structures to satisfy it.
Unlike Freud, who stressed nocturnal dreams, Bloch underscored the role of “day dreams” as progenitor of “utopias” or desired future which may be either abstract or concrete.
And two factors come into play in constructing a day dream: (a) the subjective factor, which is the human capacity for dreaming; and (b) the objective factor, that is, discernment of the possibilities latent in the real.
If these two factors are separated, one ends in subjectivism (operation of imagination without connection to reality), and the other in objectivism (rejection of the imagination and the expectation that change will come about through the simple evolution of reality).
But before we get lost in the maze of hair-splitting analysis, let’s go back to our “statutio questionis” (statement of the problem):
Is hope possible (meaningful and reasonable) even minus the element of God? As pointed out earlier, Ernst Bloch thinks so.
First of all, Bloch completely rejects the anti-utopian position, which sees
reality as containing no possibilities for the future and, therefore, regards it as destined for annihilation.
Secondly, Bloch goes beyond Marx’s “concrete utopia” and criticizes it as
“without illusions but having no concrete horizons” either.
And most importantly, while criticizing Christianity’s “abstract utopia” as being detached from reality, Bloch recognizes or gives import to the immanence or reasonableness of “Christian hope” (concretized by Christ’s incarnation and ideals for the “liberation of the poor, oppressed and deprived”).
But this “hope”, one of “militant optimism”, according to Bloch, should be
stripped of a hypostatized God, which smacks of a “mythological holdover”.
Hope is optimism, but not with the complacent optimism that we find in
those who expect capitalism to collapse simply from the pressure of its internal contradictions.
That kind of optimism is due to a lack of any horizon; Bloch calls it “new opium of the people”. Nor is hope’s optimism the hot-headed kind found in “enthusiasts”; their optimism is due to ignorance.
Bloch’s “militant optimism” is neither passive expectation nor venturesome activism. It pursues a concrete ideal that is not the mere product of desire but emerges from reality through an analysis of reality’s repressed elements.
Now, fast forward to our present dispensation – of lingering COVID-19
agony coupled with seemingly never-ending political divisiveness. Can hope yet remain a viable reality?
Iris Gonzales, in her column article (The Philippine Star, 4 February
2021) provides a refreshing, if re-assuring, answer:
“It is important to find hope in these challenging times. One can find it in businesses that continue to stay afloat, in government officials who are trying their best, in the words of a tycoon who said the worst is over, in a senior citizen billionaire who continues to brave the outside world to do business, in retrenched workers who are still eking out a living.”
In sum, yes, hope comes even during the strangest of hours. Apart from the fervor of clasped hands and bended knees, the faint muttering of the Holy Rosary, or the contrite chest-beating of penitents, hope is always available with the first glimpse of sunlight in the morning, or the view of the setting sun, the splattering of rain on the roof – and more meaningfully in the kindness of strangers, or in the smiles of people we encounter every day.
Yes, hope is meaningful and feasible even in the seeming absence of
God. It is the kind of hope that is not based on a transcendent or detached reality; it is not based on an abstract future, but one which is concretely based on the immanence of the present.