![]() ![]() What is most striking about the quoted sentiment to me is its identification of what is doing the shackling. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, or amounts to the same thing. Hope of a particular kind…“hope of reason.” The phrase may strike us as odd, unfamiliar, ambiguous: is it “reason” doing the hoping “reason” that is shackled, in need of liberation so that it may come to hope when before it was unable ? Or is it rather us, not wholly rational creatures after all, who are shackled precisely because we find ourselves unable to place our trust in reason anymore, unable to hope for reason as a vehicle of emancipation. ![]() A certain stance or attitude becomes warranted, justified, or legitimate. What becomes available through emancipation, however, is not exactly true human flourishing or a return to our un-alienated “species-being,” but rather hope. What frames the outermost layer is the Marxist desire for and insistence on the need for emancipation. The thought here is presented as a beautiful Chinese box. The title of the lecture was “Reason against itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment.” It ends with the following words: “The hope of reason lies in the emancipation from our own fear of despair.” ![]() It was spoken by the Frankfurt School critical theorist Max Horkheimer at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 1946. It captures the sentiment of suspension remarkably well and precisely. In reflecting on this, I thought of one of my favorite quotes from a philosopher. Every day, you hear people publicly pronounce that they are optimistic in spite of it all, even sometimes adding “now more than ever!” Our former president is a prime instance of this, and in the final words of his final press conference, he tried to assure us by saying, “ In my core, I think we’re going to be okay.” Most public officials and figures have opted lately, at least publicly, for the magnanimous cloak of optimism. Either side can take the high ground, insist that it is the “courageous” or “sober” or warranted response. It can either “fall” into pessimism or “steel itself up” and insist on optimism in spite of itself. It’s a state of suspension open to overtures or assurances from either camp. The sense of foreboding I mention presents itself to me as a kind of waiting room. These arguments and debates then result in the formation of two great opposing positions-meta-worldviews, as it were-Optimism and Pessimism. States or attitudes you can present arguments in favor of or in opposition to. They are treated like states you ought to be in, attitudes you ought to have, or not. Philosophy has for the most part treated them more like quasi-“objective states”, by which I mean something like cognitive attitudes which have a kind of normative status. Philosophers usually don’t feel very comfortable talking about things that can be seen as largely subjective and potentially idiosyncratic like that. Philosophy hasn’t usually treated hope and despair as moods exactly. I don’t think there is a philosophy of foreboding exactly, but in pursuit of the foundations for one, I’d like, instead, to offer a few remarks about two other moods-which have more bona fide philosophical credentials-namely hope and despair. It’s the mood I want to reflect on, and to reflect on it in the way I’ve been educated to, that is, “philosophically.” I’m not going to bother now to try to give the reasons, or the facts of recent history, why I or we might think it is legitimate to feel this way. Or worse: that it has already happened that the thunder was subdued if ominous, but the next lightning strike will not be, that it will disrupt everything about our way of life and about the possibilities for the future. ![]() A feeling that something is about to go really wrong, wrong in a way it hasn’t before for most of us, or in a way we thought no longer possible. A certain apprehensiveness, unease, disquiet, dread. The word I would offer to describe this mood would be: foreboding. What prompts me to write is a certain mood I have been in, and which I believe many others have been sharing. Section of August Rodin’s “Gates of Hell.” Rodin thought particularly of Dante’s warning over the entrance of the Inferno, “Abandon every hope, ye who enter here.” ![]()
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