Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

Only in a practical relation, however, can taking something that is theoretically insufficient to be true be called believing. This practical aim is either that of skill or of morality, the former for arbitrary and contingent ends, the latter, however, for absolutely necessary ends. Once an end is proposed, then the conditions for attaining it are hypothetically necessary. This necessity is subjectively but still only comparatively sufficient if I do not know of any other conditions at all under which the end could be attained; but it is sufficient absolutely and for everyone if I know with certainty that no one else can know of any other conditions that lead to the proposed end.

Critique of Pure Reason, A 823-4/B 851-2

1

It’s a short one today as well. Last Friday, Michael Ridge came to give a talk about hope; specifically, he argued that there are some kinds of hope that, if not immoral, at the very least they are expressive of a moral vice. In particular, the hope that, despite evil posing an apparently insurmountable hurdle to the existence of God, He could nevertheless exist. I will not get into the details of the argument, since I wouldn’t like to misrepresent it, nor to latch too much on it. There is a very poignant insight, anyway, in the notion that hope, even the gravest and most fundamental of all hopes, could be vicious. If it so happens that there are hopes that are both vicious and necessary, there may be an inextricable conflict at the core of the demands duty casts upon us.

2

Hoping for something is a psychologically complex state. It is an acknowledgement that we cannot take something for granted, that we cannot even say that it is likely, or that, though unlikely, we are willing to take our odds. In hope, all that stands is mere possibility and a desire that, nevertheless, things turn out that way. Sure, rationally speaking we won’t count on hope, and our expectations and calculations have no room for such emotional dispositions. However, if hope is genuine, there is a sense in which we don’t quite believe what we know to be true.

Hope and faith, in that sense, are siblings. The object of Kant’s hoffen is, indeed, Glaube, which can be rather clinically be rendered as “belief”, off into the pile of everything that we consider true, but which is also the proper German term for faith. When something is just an object of faith, as Kant notes, we both accept it as justified enough for us, and as not justified in general. If it attained a full justification, faith wouldn’t be faith, and hope wouldn’t be hope. Whatever reason we may have for hoping and believing, it puts us from the get-go into a very uncomfortable position; a completely stable set of doxastic attitudes towards the world would not include any articles of faith, the subjective sufficiency of the propositions we held as true would reflect their perceived objective sufficiency – such a discrepancy seems awfully irrational.

3

Ridge builds an argument based on our intuitions about certain sorts of hope, but I want to be even more general than that. Hope, if it’s to be interesting at all, cannot be practically inert, we must act somehow differently by having hope than if we lacked it (see Bovens, 1999). But if that is so, let’s have a thought about what acting under the guise of hopeful thoughts actually entails. If what I said earlier is accurate to the nature of hope, we somehow don’t fully believe what we know; we hide an expectation that our certainties will ultimately shatter, that we will (thankfully!) be proven wrong. But if that is what we base our actions on, we make a mockery of the whole endeavour of inquiry and research.

In the crudest of Kantian terms, suppose that we took as a maxim of action to expect our theoretical certainties to be proven wrong, and our deeply seated beliefs to be proven right. Then, we would never try to figure out what is true out there in the world, since we won’t care if it goes against our belief, and we won’t need more affirmation if it happens to support it. This is a maxim of maximal recklessness, which we would find intolerable in the vast majority of situations. And even more so, it is a maxim of self-deceit, of undermining our own beliefs and doubting our own eyes in the name of some privileged belief that takes precedence over the rest.

4

Nevertheless, it may so happen that two predicaments come together: that we are necessarily bound by some demand that cares not about what empirical data may bring to it, and that such demand requires us to assent to some article of faith. That is what Kant, famously, thought was the case with the moral law. Not only are we irredeemably under its binding power, but following the moral law in its full breadth, he says, eventually makes us realize that we need to believe in God and a future life. Let’s not focus too much on the particular articles that Kant thought of when constructing his practical faith.

Given the ubiquity of hope of different sorts in our actual lives, in the personal and in the political, there are two ostensible ways to interpret the situation we’re in. Either we systematically err in having faith, or hope, of any sorts, or there is something about the structure of our practices that makes such a thing as a “necessary hope” a cogent fact of the human experience. While a truly hopeless course of action may be possible (Freyenhagen, 2020), it takes some effort, at least for me, to even imagine what that would look like. Having hope engrained in our acting, there being some things we simply need to have faith in, might just be unavoidable.

5

Kant sought to buttress the rationality of his faith by making a strict distinction. It is one thing to merely wish for something, which may be completely fabricated and ludicrous, and quite another to harbour faith in something that is strictly beyond the purview of our possible knowledge. Insofar as he can draw the boundaries of what’s knowable in an apodeictic fashion, and insofar as the needs of morality only require us to posit things beyond that pale, rationality should rest assure – at no point will our needed beliefs hamper our ability to conduct disciplined inquiry into natural causes. But what if we aren’t as sure as Kant was of this? Maybe we need a meta-hope of sorts, we hope that (despite the looks of it), we should never hope something that contradicts the peaceful course of our theorizing. But how reckless is this? And how self-deceiving? It is, certainly, a huge article of faith that all our legitimate interests and the different aspects of our nature would harmonize neatly. How surprised should we be that we are forced into irrationality, with no recourse but to endorse it – and would we be able to bear this?