Hope

5. Marcel on hope

For Marcel, hope is a way of overcoming the trials of life. These trials can take the form of, for example, illness, separation, exile or slavery. ‘Hope is situated within the framework of the trial, not only corresponding to it, but constituting our being’s veritable response’ (1945: 30; original emphasis). Such trials are a potential cause of despair in which subjects ‘go to pieces’ or lose themselves (1945: 37). So there is no hope without the temptation to despair, and hope is understood by Marcel as ‘the act by which this temptation is actively or victoriously overcome’ (1945: 36).

Marcel is concerned not with intentional hopes, but ultimately with a particular form of dispositional hope which he expresses as ‘I hope in thee for us’ (1945: 60). To place one’s hope in somebody is not the same as to hope for something, that is, for some desired object, although it is usually related to such a hope. I do not want the person in whom I have placed my hope (although I may hope to gain some desired object by placing my hope in another person).

Hope is here understood as trust without self-interest. It is not like the hope of patients who place their hope in the psychiatrist, which can be expressed as ‘I hope in thee for me’. Such hope is still bound up with self-interest. Marcel sees the fundamental form of hope as expressing human dignity as the ability to transcend one’s own desires and to hope for a shared project. Here hope transcends self-interest: my relation to the other person (or persons) in whom I have placed my hope is not instrumental, but a collaborative, ethical relation of communion (1945: 67). Marcel locates such hope against a background of faith in God (1945: 60–1), rather than seeing it as Kant did against the background of the moral law.

Although the ‘thou’ in whom I hope is, for the most part, another person or group, Marcel maintains that we can regard reality itself as a thou. We do this when we cease to regard it as something which can be described exhaustively in terms of a catalogue of facts, and of what can be inferred from these facts, and regard it as an open process, that is, as full of real possibilities which are unconstrained by what is or has been the case. Marcel distinguishes between an objective judgment based on the facts, such as the judgment that there is a chance that I will see my son again, and the simple affirmation, ‘You are coming back’, which is expressed in hope (1945: 66). The former is constrained by the evidence and by what can legitimately be inferred from this, whereas the latter is not so constrained. Such hope is not based upon a calculation, or miscalculation, of probabilities, and hence is not governed by the norms of such calculation. It is rather a refusal to calculate, a refusal to regard the future as wholly delimited by the past and the present. Thus, when hope takes this form, it is beyond objective criticism. It is, however, only beyond objective criticism in so far as it is an expression of love, rather than desire (1945: 66).