The Politics of Hope and Optimism: Rorty, Havel, and the Democratic Faith of John Dewey - .Vaclav Havel, Richard Rorty - )

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Patrick J. Deneen

Hope vs. Optimism

In a series of essays culminating in his recent book Achieving Our Country, the philosopher Richard Rorty has advised the Left to become more modest with regard to revolution and more fervent with regard to reform. Revolution, he suggests, according to the twentieth-century Marxist version assumes a vision of transcendent perfection that alone can justify the complete transformation of existing social structures, even at the cost of untold human misery and death. Condemning this version of transcendent history in his essay "The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope," Rorty asks that his fellow philosophers realize that "we have reached a time at which we can finally get rid of the conviction common to Plato and Marx that there must be large theoretical ways of finding out how to end injustice, as opposed to small experimental ways" (1998, 228). ] Rather, in Achieving Our Country, he urges the Left to adopt the poetic patriotism of Whitman and the pragmatic patriotism of Dewey--to love America enough to wish to change it for the better, not by attempting to make it into utopia, but rather to improve it in "small, experimental ways." Urging the Left to abandon its foray into "cultural politics," and rather to re-engage in "real politics" of reform in imitation of the left of Progressivism, Rorty seeks to move the Left from its flirtation with Germanic pessimism and rather renew its origins as "the party of hope" (Achieving Our Country; 1998, 14).(2)

Rorty's understanding of "hope" is curious here, because his embrace of hope appears in an essay in which he rejects the Marxist conception of history that typically has represented the immanent version of hope available outside the Christian eschatology.(3) Hope for Rorty appears to be entirely shorn of its metaphysical, transcendent or historicist moorings, and instead appears to represent a positive outlook toward the world that resembles more what might be described as "optimism." At some level, Rorty himself appears to conflate the two, particularly in the frequent invocation and seeming equivalence of Rorty's two intellectual heroes in his essay "The End of Leninism, Havel and Social Hope." I refer here to the two figures that Rorty cites as guiding his own thoughts in his critique of historicism--his accustomed hero, John Dewey, and the newer entrant Vaclav Havel. Both figures are appropriate for their apparent dismissal of any kind of theory of inevitability in history, and for a more thoroughgoing belief in gradualism in politics. Yet, further reflection suggests that they represent opposite positions on the spectrum of "hope" and "optimism." In particular, what I would like to suggest is that Dewey's approach represents a form of "optimism without hope," that is, the disposition that human problems are tractable without needing to resort to any appeals to transcendence or the divine in their solution. Alternatively, Havel represents more the position that can be described as "hope without optimism," a fundamental mistrust in the belief that humans have the ability to solve political and moral problems, but that the appeal to a transcendent source--through hope--can serve as a guiding standard, as well as an encouragement to action, but at the same time a source for humility and caution in that attempt.

The surface similarities are compelling. Dewey's universe is one in which human beings function without any belief in a transcendent answer to all questions or philosophical insight into the true nature of reality or essences. Rorty also lauds the thought of Vaclav Havel for similar reasons: Havel's writings appear to offer a similar condemnation of certainty as that offered by Dewey, and also holds the appeal of "substituting groundless hope for theoretical insight" ("The End of Leninism"; 1998, 236). Yet, while Rorty correctly contends that Dewey and Havel share a fundamental distrust for culminating historical narratives, upon further reflection not on the apparent similarities between Dewey and Havel, but rather on certain central differences, one is lead to question whether Rorty hasn't blurred those differences in a way that itself obscures fundamentally different approaches to politics and democratic theory. For, while in essential respects Dewey's commendation of "uncertainty" (the accompanying doubt that arises from his criticisms of "the quest for certainty") seems to resemble Havel's advice that "we have to be very careful about coming to any conclusions about the way we are, or what can be expected from us," in fact the source of those doubts are substantially and irreconcilably different. While Dewey's doubt is skeptical in origin, arising from his refusal either to place his faith in, or to even attempt to discover, any ultimate or transcendent "truth" or "being" that might afford final insight into the human condition, Havel's doubt arises from a different source: not, like Dewey, the complete absence of any transcendent objective Truth, but rather the human inability to wholly comprehend the transcendent, which, time and time again, Havel suggests exists as a necessary underpinning of human existence, morality and action. Given this feature of Havel's thought, Rorty's re-titling of his 1998 essay in order to highlight Havel is, in fact, quite surprising. While his very brief and selective citations of Havel's interviews appear to substantiate a sketchy theory of "social hope"--i.e., hope that arises solely from discrete human endeavors devoid of appeals to "a philosophy of history and without being placed in the context of an epic or tragedy whose hero is Humanity" ("The End of Leninism"; 1998, 243), generally much of Havel's writing, and especially those dealing with "hope" specifically, appear to contradict Rorty's characterization.