Abstract: But now that the creators of fear have been dealt with, a feeling that suits us better is overdue. (1) I ANYONE WHO DECIDES TO VENTURE FORTH AN ARGUMENT for the philosophical importance of hope owes a debt to Ernst Bloch. (2) His seminal The Principle of Hope is a remarkable attempt to situate the theme of hope at the very center of the philosophical enterprise. Yet, The Principle of Hope is cited here only in order to mark the distance that separates the inquiry presented below from the strategy and, to some extent, the purpose of Bloch's work. A basic conviction of Bloch's, however, will be affirmed here: the belief that hope represents a store of raw resources both for philosophical reflection and, above all, for life itself. For Bloch, these resources were ultimately political; their discovery makes possible for humans an experience of the primordial emergence of the future, that germinating presence of concrete possibility in subjective life that takes the form of what Bloch called the not-yet-conscious. Bloch's purpose was to argue that political action can find a renewed inspiration and force in such subjective resources, and that the role of philosophy was to facilitate the assimilation of these subjective resources for the purpose of a renewal of the Western world in the aftermath of the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. In what follows, however, the question of the resources of hope--their value, accessibility, and applicability--will be approached from a particular perspective, one in which the question of the political significance of hope will be left open, at least for the purposes of this study. Instead, the purpose will be to highlight the outlines of what I take to be its specifically philosophical significance, which can be brought to bear and established before the complicated tasks of a philosophically inspired politics are shouldered. Even so, again in homage to Bloch, that such tasks can and must be shouldered is not something that I wish to call into question. More specifically, the purpose of this essay is to suggest how these resources of hope point toward a particular aspect of the subject that, even once all the doubts about the legitimacy of a subject-centered philosophy have been given their due, nevertheless represents a potential basis for proposing a certain kind of recalibration of the contemporary philosophical appraisal of the rationalist conception of subjectivity. The goal is thus to reengage the problem of subjectivity, that is, the question of the potential contribution of the theme of the subjectivity of the subject to the formulation and establishment of philosophy, in order to suggest that there are elements of the subjectivist tradition of modern philosophy that are ripe for at least a limited renewal. The strategy will be to identify an undervalued but potentially significant aspect of the modern conception of the subject that found its most suggestive expression in late Renaissance and early modern philosophy, where the tension between theology and philosophy played a central role. Furthermore, it will be argued that something like a historical reflection on seventeenth-century philosophy is necessary because the philosophical significance of hope can be grasped only as the result of an attempt to reposition oneself, in order to reawaken or reexperience this peculiar but productive tension between philosophy and theology that was so important in the development of seventeenth-century thought. The philosophical significance of hope, which will lie in the sense in which the subject is able to provide a center and orientation for philosophical thinking, draws its vitality in part from a particular historical memory latent in contemporary philosophy--the memory, in short, of a tension with theology. What follows below, however, is not primarily a historical study. It is first and foremost an inquiry into a strictly delimited set of phenomenological concerns. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 6
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