I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
More from Han’s The Spirit of Hope today, which is providing me with a wealth of ideas to ponder and write about.
Who was Spinoza?
Portuguese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) was one of the most important philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1500 – c. 1800) following the Middle Ages. He worked within a rationalist school of thought that included Leibniz and René Descartes. His master project was The Ethics, which, surprisingly given its name, used a mathematical structure modeled on Euclid’s geometry. He attempted to understand truth through logical deductions beginning from self-evident axioms.
This isn’t a blog post about Spinoza. I want only to tell you (and remind me) who he was and what his mode of thought was.
Spinoza on hope and Han counter-Spinoza; hope vs reason
Byung-Chul Han, in The Spirit of Hope, notes that Spinoza considered hope to be irrational; he said that “whoever acts under the ‘guidance of reason’ needs neither hope nor fear.”
Han quotes Spinoza from The Ethics:
In proportion, therefore, as we endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason, shall we strive as much as possible to depend less on hope, to liberate ourselves from fear, to rule fortune, and to direct our actions by the sure counsels of reason.
And then Han goes on to explain:
Spinoza rules out the possibility that hope could open up a space for action that is not accessible to reason. However, hope builds a bridge across the abyss into which reason cannot look. It can hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason does not recognize the signs of what is coming, what is not yet born. Reason is an organ that detects what is already there.
This is what I’m getting at with the idea of recklessness — that you cannot reason your way forward. You cannot predict the future, you cannot see into it, like you can see the past. The reckful approach is to use your reason plus your knowledge of the future to forecast outcomes, under different courses of action. Instead living in hopefulness provides an entirely different paradigm for determining action.
Hope is made of enthusiasm and motivation
Han continues:
The conventional criticism of hope ignores its complexity and inner tensions. Hope goes far beyond passive expectations and wishes. Hope’s fundamental traits are enthusiasm and motivation – it is a spring. It is even ‘a militant emotion’ that ‘unfurls banners’.1 Inherent in it is a determination to act. It develops forces that make people spring into action. We must distinguish between two kinds of hope: a passive, inactive and weak sort and an active, acting and strong one. It is true that passive hope approximates the vain wish. Active and strong hope, however, inspires people to creative action. [emphasis mine]
It is hope that leads someone to start a Substack newsletter, imagining that, with their words, they might cross the divide that exists between them and another person. It is hope that leads someone to upload an image of a painting to a website, and announce that painting is available for sale, as though another person might want to hang this creative product onto a wall. It is hope that leads someone to message someone they find attractive on an online dating app, regardless of whether that person seems appropriate for them. It is hope that leads someone in their twenties to pursue a difficult graduate degree in preparation for a career that is largely unknown to them. It is hope that leads someone to invest in a highly volatile precious metal, thinking that the needs of both AI data centers and sovereign institutions might bid up the price.
Hope and recklessness go hand in hand. The reckful approach is, instead, more fearful and more doubtful. Reckfulness says, “I can know the future through my reasoning and my understanding of the past.” Recklessness says, “I can’t know the future but I can imagine it, I can hope for good things, I can help bring this imagined, hoped-for future into being.”
- Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, p. 112. Cited by Han. ↩︎