Mode of Hope
When we hope for something to happen, we tend to engage, tacitly or in almost manic repetition, in a constant re-evaluation of our favours. We speculate about how likely it is that what we hope for might become true and which pulls and pushes make this more probable. Ideally, we wish we could change the constellation of the world’s events and causalities to force a probability of 1.
But certainty is after hoping. For a subject A to hope for some x requires that x is uncertain to A – or else it would count as knowing.[1] As knowers, we can predict the future. As hopers, we must speculate. There is a continuum to these speculations – between those with a probability of x so high, that hoping is a happy longing – and cursed gambles, mad hopes, in which uncertainty is but consolation. In her two essay collections, Hope in the Dark and No Straight Road Gets You There Rebecca Solnit writes on the latter. Hope, she says, is often confused with optimism. But a less kitsch instantiation of hoping can mean to simply insist on the factual uncertainty of future events and recognise that, however unlikely, good ones may be among them. A non-zero probability that, beyond our predictions, may transform into reality. If hope tolerates this minimal positive – and the aching ambiguity it generates – it can turn paralysis into action. Solnit tells the stories of people whose contentment with speculation rather than good prognoses leads them to keep working on their cause – guessing, testing, and re-adjusting their actions as an active part of their hope.
This speculative rumination becomes more pronounced in our heads the less we have insight into the impact of our actions on the probabilities of future events. When we hope within epistemically opaque, chaotic environments – but uncynically hope, in Solnit’s sense – we might want to water every seed of probabilistic growth – from skincare to ritualistic offerings. We are tempted and willing to count any small hint, however unrelated, as evidence of success. We test theories, look for shortcuts, so that some may someday turn out to have an impact. With a desire for increasing control, we rationalise an arsenal of tactics for a game to which no one has given us the rules and paytables.
[1] Following a standard minimal definition of hope in contemporary analytic philosophy (following J.P. Day, or Downie for instance, see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), x must also be desired by the subject and possible in a meaningful sense. But these criteria are not the focus of this work.