In the article “Education and Hope in the era of Globalizing Capitalism” I am interested to articulate the fundamental dimension of all human activity that is focused on change. In a best possible sense education should be seen as this kind of human activity and this is the reason that the question on hope is one of key aspects of educational theory and practice. The concept of hope is set in the article to the context globalizing capitalism. It is argued that at the same time this globalization is affecting this fundamental dimension of human activity by reducing the possibilities of articulating hopes in cultural settings. But also it is seen that this dimension is the needed antidote to the ever increasing real-political one-dimensional mentality of the Fachmenschen. Aginst this Freire (1997, 30, 40) once wrote that “I am a totality and not a dichotomy […] I know with my entire body, with feelings, with passion, and also with reason” and this breaths that “Hope is an ontological requirement for human beings.”
Jiri Weil (1998) wrote a famous book Life with the Star, where he used his own experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust. In this visionary book, Weil is drawing to us with gentle sweeps a political and social void. In this manner
8 Themes from this chapter I have previously elaborated in my article Moisio 2006b which is not included to this dissertation.
Weil is taking a step outwards from the dimension of the modern life that Kafka analysed in his introspection of bureaucratic individuality. The book tells us the ground work of genocide. The progressive retraction of the rights of citizenship and humanity from a people, and neither Roubicek who is the main character of the book, nor anyone around him does much to resist it. For example in one scene which is quite revealing Roubicek is thrown off a streetcar and roughed up by soldiers in front of large crowd. The other passengers "were looking at the floor, as if they were searching for a coin that had rolled under the wooden slats. Nobody spoke."
Eventually, the book moves back from this existential null point, and Roubicek begins to reclaim his humanity. He is assigned a job growing vegetables in a graveyard, the only land the Jews are allowed to cultivate, and he begins a process of reflection on death. When the Nazis build a center for the processing of the deportees, and tell everyone they are building a circus, Roubicek remembers his childhood. "When I watched the seals pushing a ball with their snouts I didn't know it was a bad thing to be an animal in the circus.
It did not occur to me that it was something that seals did not usually do....But when I myself was to perform in the circus, I didn't like to remember the sound of the whip and the cries of the tamers." But even animals, a farmer tells him, will not do certain things. Why then, wonders Roubicek, will humans do anything; even participate in their own destruction, in a desperate attempt to cling to life? He sees it is not just death which awaits him, but a faceless, nameless death. He makes a decision which gives him hope, not so much for survival as for a life and death which escapes the regimented extinction the Nazis have proscribed for him.
So Roubicek is drawn to the conclusion that the real struggle for the hope starts only when there is no hope left at all. We must decide to cling on to the hope even though we might know that this hope is in vain. In a remarkable passage, Roubicek rakes the graveyard and imagines a fable where the prayers for the dead rise up to heaven in a song, and then "as the song flew off with the leaves and the leaves fell into the mud and dirt, they were raised up again by the wind, and they fell on plowed fields and flew about garbage dumps. The song became trite, the kind played on accordions in dance halls; drunks wept when they heard it... But the tears of the angel of death, falling as pebbles, had always been in it...the song had always flown through the land with the blood of the martyrs."
Like Weil in his literature, Ernst Bloch (1995, 2000) was interested in his philosophical work on the subjective and objective dimensions of hope, which receives its content from the subjective dimension of human experience as it is articulated in human culture in general. He tries to decipher and articulate the hidden texture of the human drive and hunger for a better future. This drive keeps the humanity alive; it gives reason for its existence, and it also contains the possibilities for improvement of life in general. This orientation forward can be seen in the individual as the intentionality of a subjective consciousness, as it relentlessly and continuously reaches out for an adequate object. The object that it seeks is not yet given in the present, and it has not been present in the past,
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but it gives breath for tomorrow, for the future. This subject-object relationship is a dynamic that strives ultimately towards its final goal, towards what is hoped for.
But before the distinction between subject and object there exists the basic and fundamental human drive that Bloch (1995, 45) names “hunger”. This hunger lives off that which is “Not-Yet”. Its form is searching, a desire for something, through a goal-directed drive. Bloch argues that hunger gives rise to dreams, daydreams, wishes, planning, and a longing for something better, for something that is different than the given, for the new. By defining human nature with one fundamental drive and one fundamental attitude, Bloch is able to explain human beings as being open towards the future and, what is even more, that human beings are driven towards this unseen future by a force within them (Bloch 1995, 13). This is how hunger and hope intervene as a motivational force behind humanity and education in general.
Human beings are able to actively generate images of that which they hunger and hope for. In this sense, Bloch (1995, 85) is in agreement with Freud when he writes that “every dream is a wish fulfilment”. He goes on and writes that “the daydream is not a stepping-stone to the night-dream and is not disposed of by the latter. Not even with respect to its clinical content, let alone it artistic, pre-appearing […] anticipatory content. For night-dreams mostly cannibalize the former life of the drives, they feed on the past if not archaic image-material, and nothing new happens under their bare moon” (Bloch 1995, 87). In this quote, Bloch gives weight to daydreams over night-dreams as a vehicle of wishes. As fantasies, daydreams are a fundamental key to understanding how human beings align their imagination with their needs. In the daydream “the ego starts a journey into the blue, but ends it whenever it wants” (Bloch 1995, 88). The daydream remains under the conscious control of the will because the ego of the daydream is active in the context of its waking life.
We cannot escape a daydream when it occurs, while we are able to, for example, pause the high tempo life that we are leading. In this stillness of the now there opens a way to articulate the “Not-Yet-Conscious” as a mode of consciousness of what is coming to be, “the psychological birthplace of the new” (Bloch 1995, 116). If this dreaming while awake starts being critical towards the given, it becomes more authentic. This is inevitable, because the daydream recognizes that everything in reality is pregnant with possibilities waiting to burst into wide-open spaces. In this sense, the human desire that finds its expression in daydreams leads to hoping for a new and always possible future.
This utopian imagination is touched by what is actually real. This “real tendency forward” is an objectively real possibility that is present in time.
While fantasizing results in an abstract, theoretical and in a sense remote vision of the future, the utopian consciousness is completely attuned to the concrete and its real and actual possibilities. This is why imaginative ideas or wishful images are anticipatory; they extend reality beyond its definite limits. They always try to reach “into the future possibilities of its being different and
better” (Bloch 1995, 144). Bloch (ibid) goes on and writes that “Not-Yet Conscious itself must become conscious in its act known in its content”.
Our present world is not static; it is not fully determined. What is real is practically and actually being transformed into the “Possible”. This is why it is a concrete aspect of utopia as a “process-reality” which has a corresponding element ”of the mediated Novum” (Bloch 1995, 197). The real is actually and always in a process of becoming. As Bloch (1991, 132) writes in his Heritage of Our Times, “everything flows, but the river comes from a source every time. It takes matter with it from the regions through which it has run, this colour its waters for a long time”. Utopia is already and always a synthesis that tries to articulate how the subjective is translated into the objective, how a dream tries to picture a concrete relation to the future, and how hope is the source of the history that human beings individually or collectively create.
Hope is not given but it is learnt. In this sense, the ontology of hope is the ontology of a real possibility. We learn and silently become aware of the dimension of the possible. In this process, wishful thinking is transformed into a wish-full and effective action. This why hope connects and forms an alliance between theory and practice, which become a world-changing energy that is based to a primary hunger for what is not yet present. (Bloch 1995, 73.) Bloch (1970, 92) writes that “action will release available transitional tendencies into active freedom only if the utopian goal is clearly visible, unadulterated and unrenounced. Even though the utopias have at best promised their still so palpable optima, but have promised them as objectively and really possible”. In this sense, utopia is a blue horizon in which every reality is grasped with its hidden possibilities.
Bloch argues that future is the mode of time which provides the needed space for the realization of the possibilities of history, or more accurately, in history. What is already and what is not-yet belong to human activity that is actualized in world history. This is why Bloch sees that as human yearning and venturing beyond appear in a variety of forms, it follows that utopia will be conceived in various different ways. But only concrete utopias can generate hope and action that will open the passage to a new future. That is why hope is connected to that which is not yet realized be it in individual or cultural level and it is a part and parcel of all forms of education.
Hope in education is connected to the two other human qualities: faith and fortitude. Fromm said that without hope there would be no life and we can make a further statement that no education either. Education is connected to hope and it lives in the faith and trust of something other that what is. But it is never certain. This forms a dynamic concept of hope that takes into a consideration its counterpart hopelessness or despair. In fact, as Fromm (1966, 201-223) has shown to us, without genuine despair there would be no hope. These two are internally connected. Fromm (1966, 208) writes that “only when the frightened, despairing person experiences the full depth of his despair can he ‘return’, can he liberate himself from despair and achieve hope.” The faith in education is
“certainty of uncertainty” – lighthouse in the darkness that surrounds humanity.
But hope should be something else in education than mere subjective longing
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for this or that thing that we desire at the moment. It should be fortitude and love of life; ability to yell “no!” even though the whole world around you is yelling “yes!”