Adorno on hope

1. Negativism and radical hope

Lear introduces the concept of radical hope in order to make sense of the comportment of the Crow Chief Plenty Coups as he led his tribe through a period of cultural devastation. During his lifetime, Plenty Coups experienced the end of the Crow way of life, which revolved around hunting and warfare. When the Crow had to stop hunting buffalo, move onto a reservation and cease warfare, they lost not only the material basis of their way of life, but also the entire horizon of meaning and value that had informed their life, their poetry and their rituals. Lear shows how Plenty Coups responded to this cultural devastation with great courage, making creative decisions, such as leading his tribe into a pact with the American forces against the Sioux, negotiating with Washington politicians and achieving good outcomes for the Crow in a difficult political environment. Plenty Coup’s courage was underpinned by radical hope that the Crow would flourish again, a hope that he traced back to a childhood dream (I will return to this dream below).

What, then, is radical hope? According to Lear, ‘[w]hat makes…hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it’ (Lear 2006, 103). Elsewhere in the book, Lear writes that it is a commitment to the ‘bare idea’ or ‘possibility…that something good will emerge (Lear 2006, 94, 97). If ordinary hope is the desire for a good outcome that is neither certain nor impossible, but whose goodness is well understood by the person who desires it, ⁴ radical hope is the desire for an outcome where the ground of its desirability, that is, its goodness, transcends the current abilities of those who desire it to understand what it is. It is a desire for a future that therefore can only be grasped as good retrospectively, if and when it has eventuated and equipped people with concepts with which they can understand it (Lear 2006, 115).

It is easy to see why Adorno’s conception of hope must share important features with Lear’s conception of radical hope. According to most interpretations, Adorno’s critical social theory is negativistic. As Fabian Freyenhagen has argued, this negativism takes four forms (Freyenhagen 2013, 3–5; 2017, 862). First, Adorno is an epistemic negativist who believes that we currently cannot know what the good is or what happiness is. Second, this epistemic negativism means that Adorno must be a methodological negativist; he thinks that philosophers should investigate negative phenomena, such as pain and suffering, rather than positive ones, such as the good or happiness, in order to elaborate their theories. Third, more specifically, Freyenhagen argues that Adorno, therefore, should be read as a meta-ethical negativist who accounts for the normative force of his ethics through an appeal to what is bad for human beings, rather than through an appeal to what is good for them or what makes them happy (Freyenhagen 2013, 187-254). Finally, and most controversially, Freyenhagen argues that Adorno subscribes to epistemic negativism (and therefore to methodological and meta-ethical negativism), because he is a substantive negativist who believes that the modern world is bad or, as he often puts it, radically evil, rather than good. Substantive negativism is controversial, because it seems to imply that the world does not contain anything positive, all things considered. Any seeming goodness or happiness is either fleeting or tainted by its entanglements in the radically evil world (Freyenhagen 2013, 10–11; 2017, 870; cf. Theunissen 1983, 47).

To be sure, one may doubt the plausibility of substantive negativism, and it is not entirely clear what status it has in Adorno’s critical social theory. If it is meant to be a factual claim, it is hard to see how it could be demonstrated. How could one show that, as a matter of fact, no genuine goodness or happiness does exist in the current social world? If it is a normative judgement about the current social world, people may reasonably disagree whether the evil that undoubtedly exists or has existed (e.g. during the Holocaust), in fact, does taint all goodness and happiness in the present, or whether there are ‘features of our lives…that are not falsely meaningful’ (and, presumably, good); for example, in personal relationships (O’Connor 2017, 858). Of course, even if one doubts the plausibility of substantive negativism, one still may endorse epistemic negativism and remain agnostic about the existence of genuine goodness or happiness, because the radical evil that pervades the current social world makes it impossible to know whether any genuine goodness or happiness exists or to identify it reliably. As we shall see, much of Adorno’s argument does not depend on substantive negativism, but it does make a difference when it comes to understanding why Adorno thinks that we have reasons for hope (see my discussion in section ‘Reasons for hope’).

In addition, Adorno’s reflections on hope reveal that he endorses a fifth form of negativism. He is an imaginative negativist who thinks that we cannot conceive or imagine what the good would look like. Imaginative negativism is a distinct form of negativism and more radical than epistemic negativism, because imagining is not constrained by the epistemic norms of knowledge acquisition, and, therefore, we reasonably can imagine much more than we can know. However, there is clear evidence that Adorno denies our ability to imagine the good. Thus, in one well-known passage, he writes: ‘In the right condition everything would be, as in the Jewish theologoumenon, only the slightest bit different from what it is now, but not the slightest thing can be imagined [vorstellen] about how it would then be’ (ND 294/352). Similarly, discussing the ‘supremacy’ of objective reality in determining what we can think, he writes,

Whoever presents an image of the right conditions, in order to answer the objection that he does not know what he wants, cannot disregard that supremacy [which extends] also over him. Even if his imagination [Phantasie] were capable of imagining [vorzustellen] everything as radically different, it would still remain chained to him and his present time as static points of reference, and everything would be askew. (ND 345/35)

While Plenty Coups’ radical hope is a response to the end of the traditional Crow way of life, the historical background of Adorno’s discussion of negativism is the Holocaust, although his methodological negativism may precede it. Adorno sees the Holocaust as the culmination of the realisation of evil in the world, after which nothing can remain as it was before, and everything, including philosophy, must be questioned as to its compatibility or even complicity with the bad. Adorno certainly thought that he was writing in the face of cultural devastation as much as Plenty Coups was, albeit for different reasons. Whereas the Crow Chief faced a future that would no longer contain the Crow way of life, Adorno and his contemporaries faced a future in which they no longer could appeal to the idea of human progress or the belief in the ultimate goodness of existence.

This difference between the two cases points to a very important difference between the two conceptions of radical hope. While Plenty Coup faced a future that would be radically different from his past, he was not forced to question the very meaning and value of the Crow past. Crow history up to then had not been rendered meaningless or valueless in virtue of the fact that the Crow way of life would come to an end. In fact, Lear’s speculative reconstruction of Plenty Coups’ thought sees his hope as being rooted in a deep commitment to the existence of a transcendent goodness in the world that makes it possible to hope for a ‘revival’ of the traditional Crow way of life, albeit in a form that is not yet intelligible (Lear 2006, 95). To see this, recall that the immediate source of Plenty Coups’ radical hope was a childhood dream, which plays an important role in Crow mythology. Following a ritual that many young Crow underwent, Plenty Coups elicited this dream during a lonely fast in a remote place, after chopping off a fingertip and pleading with God to pity him (Lear 2006, 66). This establishes a continuity between the past and the unknown future ahead, which is underpinned by faith and tradition, even though neither faith nor tradition can give Plenty Coups any direct guidance on how to face the unknown future. ⁶

In contrast, for Adorno, the Holocaust has thrown the meaning and value of our past into radical doubt. Reason itself has lost any semblance of innocence, and therefore we cannot appeal to it in any straightforward way in order to orient ourselves in our attitudes to either the past or the future. In particular, Adorno and Horkheimer’s genealogy of reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment aimed to show that the rise of instrumental reason rendered the natural world meaningless while shedding the normative content of reason itself. From the standpoint of the present, the disenchanted world that resulted from this process offers neither meaningful resources that can help us to imagine a better future nor robust values that would enable us to judge what such a future ought to be like. ⁷ This analysis gives Adorno a different reason from Plenty Coups’ for why any hope for the future must be radical hope. His epistemic and imaginative negativism about the good with its roots in the experience of the Holocaust leads Adorno to argue that any determinate picture of the future will be informed by the badness of the current world and is therefore tainted.

This background enables us to understand an otherwise puzzling claim that Adorno makes in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics. He writes: ‘It is always the possible (das Mögliche), never the immediately actual (das unmittelbar Wirkliche), that blocks the path to utopia’ (ND 66/57). ⁸ One way of interpreting this claim is to note that the immediately actual and utopia do not share the same conceptual space, whereas the possible and utopia do. ⁹ Utopia, for Adorno, refers to a possible future that radically and totally differs from the past and present. As he put it in a conversation with Ernst Bloch,

Whatever utopia is, whatever can be imagined as utopia, this is the transformation of the totality. And the imagination of such a transformation of the totality is basically very different in all the so-called utopian accomplishments [viz. those made possible by technological progress; TJ]—which, incidentally, are all really like you say: very modest, very narrow. It seems to me that what people have lost subjectively in regard to consciousness is very simply the capability to imagine the totality as something that could be completely different. (Quoted in Bloch 1987, 3–4)

2. Adorno’s criticism of Kantian hope

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno develops his conception of radical hope through a critique of Kant’s conception of hope. According to Adorno, Kant’s critical philosophy is guided by a ‘rescuing urge [Begierde des Rettens]’ (ND 378/385), that is, the urge to rescue or salvage the achievements of dogmatic metaphysics in a non-dogmatic way. These achievements include the objectivity of experience as well as the ‘cardinal propositions of metaphysics’, freedom of the will, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. ¹² Adorno offers a characterisation of Kant’s predicament with regard to metaphysics that gives it a time-diagnostic thrust.

Kant’s rescue of the intelligible sphere is not merely the Protestant apologetics known to all; it also attempts to intervene in the dialectic of enlightenment at the point where it terminates in the abolition of reason itself. The construction of immortality as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason bears witness to the fact that Kant’s rescuing urge lies much deeper than simply in the pious wish to preserve something of the traditional ideas amidst nominalism and against it. It condemns the intolerability of the existing [world] and strengthens the spirit that recognises it. That no inner-worldly improvement suffices to do justice to the dead; that none touches on the unjustness of death, moves Kantian reason to hope against reason. The secret of his philosophy is the unthinkability of despair. (ND 377–378/385)

I believe that Adorno is sympathetic to the position in which Kant finds himself, but he criticises the manner in which Kant tries to extricate himself from it. ¹⁵ In particular, Adorno criticises Kant for postulating God’s existence and the immortality of the soul as Postulates of Pure Practical Reason, because these Postulates ‘populate’ the intelligible sphere with concrete transcendent possibilities, which have to be affirmed in thought. This move establishes Kantian hope as a third form of hope between ordinary and radical hope. As we shall see, Kantian hope differs from ordinary hope in that its rationality depends on our belief in transcendent objects. However, Kantian hope also differs from radical hope in that it gives content to an intelligible sphere, rather than limiting itself to a bare commitment to the possibility of transcendence.

At this point, it is important to spell out exactly the relationship between the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason and Kantian hope, because it is easy to miss both the distinction between moral belief and hope and the way in which the former makes the latter possible. ¹⁶ Thus, commentators often assume that the objects of the Postulates, especially God and immortality, are the objects of Kantian hope (O’Neill 1996; Flikschuh 2009). If this was right, Kantian hope would be a form of radical or unimaginable hope, because the Postulates outstrip our conceptual abilities to comprehend them (Martin 2014, 103–104). However, as Andrew Chignell has pointed out, Kant believes that ‘what may I hope?’ is a question for the philosophy of religion, rather than for the critique of reason (Chignell 2013, 2014). On this reading, Kant argues that we have good reasons to believe or have faith (Glauben) in, rather than hope for, God’s existence and the immortality of our soul. And it is this belief that warrants Kantian hope for God’s assistance in our quest for moral perfection (Rel 171), for happiness in proportion to virtue (A809/B837; KpV 122–125), and for the establishment of an ethical community on earth (Rel 94). Thus, the Postulates themselves are not the objects of hope, because while moral belief is not knowledge, or, logical certainty, it is stronger than hope, namely, moral certainty (Chignell 2013, 198). As Kant puts it,

The conviction is not logical but moral certainty, and, since it depends on subjective grounds (of moral disposition) I must not even say ‘It is morally certain that there is a God,’ etc. but rather ‘I am morally certain’ etc. That is, the belief in a God and another world is so interwoven with my moral disposition that I am in as little danger of ever surrendering the former as I am worried that the latter can ever be torn away from me. (A828–829/B857–858)

Adorno’s first argument against Kant’s Postulates concerns the compatibility of our experiences in the actual world with any possible, better world. In particular, Adorno argues that the experience of the Holocaust forces us to re-evaluate the traditional conception of metaphysics, which underwrites our hope for a better future, and which he also ascribes to Kant. According to this conception of metaphysics, ‘the immutable is truth and the mutable, transient is semblance [Schein]’, so that there is a ‘mutual indifference between temporal things and eternal ideas’ (ND 354/361). As a result, nothing that happens in the actual world should, in principle, undermine our belief in an ideal, transcendent order that would vouchsafe our future redemption and enable us to reconcile ourselves to our actual world. However, according to Adorno, the Holocaust has destroyed any sense that an appeal to transcendent entities can endow immanent experience with a positive meaning. It ‘make[s] a mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence’ (ND 354/361). Philosophers of history cannot integrate the Holocaust into a progressive historical narrative; no theodicy is possible in the post-Auschwitz world. As a result, our ‘ability to engage in metaphysics is paralysed because what happened shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience’ (ND 354/361–362). This sentiment is often expressed in terms of the inability to believe in God after Auschwitz.

Historical-philosophical reflection turns the table on traditional conceptions of metaphysics insofar as it takes an immanent event, the Holocaust, and its consequences, inexpressible suffering, as index veri for the transcendent. ‘The course of history forces materialism upon metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism’ (ND 358/365). Adorno’s Meditations bring metaphysics into a dialectical relationship with the empirical world: not only does metaphysics orient us in our empirical life, but also our empirical life constrains what our metaphysics can be. This is broadly compatible with Kant, who also believes that our metaphysical commitments ultimately are motivated by moral concerns. However, Adorno thinks that after Auschwitz ‘[n]o word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, has any right unless it underwent a transformation’ (ND 360/367). On this view, the Holocaust has created a sphere of pure immanence, where no appeal to transcendent ideals is possible and everything that can be thought at all is immanent in the empirical world. If this is true, then the question becomes whether ‘metaphysical experience’, and therefore, Kantian hope, is still possible (ND 365/372, see also my discussion in the section ‘Reasons for hope’).

Adorno’s second argument against Kant concerns the immortality of the soul, a belief that occupies a central place in Christian thought and, therefore, also in traditional metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition. Adorno’s argument parallels the argument about a future, better world. He argues that our recent historical experience has robbed us of what made death bearable in the past, namely, ‘the feeling of its epic unity with the rounded [gerundeten] life’ (ND 362/369). Of course, Adorno is aware of the dubious character that this solace takes when he writes that old and tired people feel that it is right for them to die because their lives were already not lived any longer in any emphatic sense. Nevertheless, in our administered society (der vergesellschafteten Gesellschaft) even that solace is absent and death has become incommensurable with life. Furthermore, Adorno suggests that our knowledge of the Holocaust deprives us of the hope of an afterlife.

Death in the camps is a new horror: since Auschwitz, fearing death means fearing worse than death. What death does to the socially condemned can be anticipated biologically on old people we love; not only their bodies but their egos [ihr Ich], everything that determined them as human, crumbles without illness or violent intervention. The remnant of confidence in their transcendent endurance vanishes during their life on earth, so to speak: what should be the part of them that is not dying? (ND 364/371) ¹⁹

Taken together, if Adorno is right, these arguments suggest that our experience of life has rendered belief in God’s existence and our immortality problematic for reasons to do with our experience in the actual world. Adorno speaks of the ‘historical-philosophical collapse of the metaphysical ideas’ (ND 365/372), which renders them absurd. However, since the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason provide the warrant for the rationality of Kantian hope, the demise of the Postulates also renders Kantian hope for God’s assistance in our quest for moral perfection, happiness in proportion to virtue, and the establishment of an ethical community on earth irrational.

Of course, these arguments are open to objections. In particular, defenders of Kant could deny that any empirical arguments can undermine our moral beliefs in God and immortality. Kant suggests as much in the Jäsche Logic, where he argues that moral belief is a holding-to-be-true (Fürwahrhalten) ‘of what I accept on moral grounds, and in such a way that I am certain that the opposite can never be proved’ (L 67). ²¹ He even suggests that this form of ‘practical conviction’ can be firmer than knowledge, because with knowledge ‘one still listens to opposed grounds, but not with belief, because here it does not depend on objective grounds but on the moral interest of the subject’ (L 72). Adorno could reply that the devastation of moral and ethical life that made the Holocaust possible has undermined the individual moral certainty that Kant presupposes in his arguments. In particular, Adorno argues that only a minimal ‘ethics of resistance’ is warranted in our radically evil world (Finlayson 2002; Freyenhagen 2013), and that this minimal ethics is characterised by humility with regard to one’s moral and ethical convictions, including one’s ability to know what the right thing is, to do it, and to achieve the right outcome. While Kant suggests that moral belief in God and immortality is inextricably linked with individuals’ self-image as moral agents, Adorno suggests that modern individuals have lost faith in that self-image. As a result, their sense of moral obligation may not be accompanied by a sense of being justified in believing either that they are able to do the right thing or the truth of the Postulates which underwrite belief in that ability. ²²

Adorno’s criticism of the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason and the Kantian hope they warrant does not entail a rejection of hope tout court. Adorno does consider himself a metaphysical thinker (M 177/114), and in the ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ he argues that there is a conceptual space for radical hope in Kant’s critical philosophy. In the Meditation entitled ‘Mundus Intelligibilis’, Adorno criticises Kant’s conception of the intelligible sphere for its positivity (Positivität, ND 383/391). That is to say, Adorno criticises Kant for populating the intelligible sphere with concrete transcendent possibilities, which have to be affirmed in thought (God’s existence, immortality). For Adorno, on the other hand, the intelligible sphere is necessary because it shows that a different world is possible. The concept of the intelligible sphere ‘would be that of something which is not, and yet is not only not’ (ND 385/392), and in an important passage he sketches the reasons for this claim.

The concept of the intelligible is the self-negation of finite spirit. In spirit, what merely is becomes aware of its lack; departure from existence that has become obdurate is the origin of that in spirit in which it is different from the principle of the domination of nature in it…spirit’s hostility to life would be nothing but despicable, if it did not issue in its self-reflection [Selbstbesinnung]. False is the asceticism it demands of others, good is its own. (ND 384–385/392)

3. Hope against reason?

As we have seen, Adorno characterises Kant’s rescue of metaphysics as ‘hope against reason’, motivated by the ‘unthinkability of despair’ (ND 378/385), and his criticism of the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason suggests that it is no longer rational to believe in God’s existence or in the immortality of the soul. However, while Kantian hope is subject to rationality constraints that makes it conditional upon belief in the Postulates, radical hope is not subject to the same constraints. Due to the unimaginable character of its objects, radical hope is ‘immune to empirical disappointment’ (Martin 2014, 101) brought about by individual experience and collective history. At the same time, hope in all its forms is not a purely active, voluntary element of our rational agency. It is not something we do and can stop doing at will. Béatrice Han-Pile has argued in a recent article that hope involves two forms of agential limitations: first, we experience the limits of our agency, because the eventuation of the hoped-for outcome is beyond our control; second, our agency also is limited, because whether we have hope for a particular outcome is beyond our control. Thus, we often feel impelled to hope in the face of adverse reasons or facts, while, conversely, when we are hopeless we cannot be talked into being hopeful through the listing of all the reasons there are for being hopeful (Han-Pile 2017, 179–184).

Adorno’s own reflections on hope demonstrate its partially involuntary character. To see this, consider a remarkable exchange in Adorno’s correspondence with Thomas Mann. After the publication of Adorno’s In Search of Wagner, Mann sent his impressions of it to Adorno and quotes a passage from the book in which Adorno discusses the possibility that ‘a degenerating [verfallende] society develops the seeds of the society that will perhaps one day take its place’. ²⁵ Mann comments: ‘If there were only a single positive word, my honoured friend, that vouchsafed even the vaguest glimpse of the true society which we are forced to postulate! In this respect, and only this, your own reflections from damaged life say nothing.’ ²⁶ In other words, Mann challenges Adorno to jettison his negativism and to give a positive indication of the better, future life that may be possible, a move that Adorno had ruled out in his criticism of Kant’s Postulate concerning God’s existence. Adorno’s response is revealing.

If anything in Hegel, and in those who turned him right way up, has become part of my very flesh and blood, it is an asceticism with regard to any unmediated expression of the positive. This truly is a case of asceticism, believe me, since the opposite impulse, a tendency to the unfettered expression of hope, really lies much closer to my own nature. ²⁷

The correspondence between Adorno and Mann contains a similar remark related to immortality. Recall that Adorno’s criticism of the Postulate of the immortality of the soul is based on the idea that we can observe in old people a process of bodily and spiritual degeneration that makes it hard to believe that there is a ‘part of them that is not dying’ (ND 364/371). However, in a letter to Thomas Mann, Adorno describes his own experience of his mother’s death in words that suggest a more complicated picture. Adorno writes,

A couple of weeks ago my mother died in New York at the age of eighty-seven. And just because our last meeting was actually so sad—I hardly recognized her any more than she recognized herself—the final parting has affected me very deeply. With a loved one we are tempted to regard even the decline that accompanies extreme old age as a merely temporary state, and we can only hope that we are ultimately right to do so. ²⁹

Adorno recognises, then, from his own experience, that hope is only partially voluntary. Our psychological disposition may induce us to harbour hope. He is acutely aware though that in the political realm ordinary or Kantian hope may encourage ‘the cause of untruth’, and, therefore, he embraces a cautious asceticism, a negativism of the imagination, with regard to any endorsement of positivity, that is, a refusal to engage in any positive expression of hope for a better future world that would render its shape more concrete. This leads us to Adorno’s criticism of the metaphysical need for hope and his insistence that courage to challenge the existing world depends on knowledge of the worst.

4. The metaphysical need for hope and knowledge of the worst

According to Adorno, ‘in today’s resurrected metaphysics need usurps what it lacks’ (ND 365/372). The danger of this usurpation is wishful thinking (ND 399/407). In particular, Adorno criticises the tendency to move from a real or imagined metaphysical need that there be hope to the conclusion that there are reasons for hope, be it ordinary or Kantian. In contrast, he believes that if there is hope, it will be radical and reveal itself to us at the moment of our full insight into our predicament, as hopeless as this may seem. Thus, hope comes after despair has been worked through. Any attempt to give people hope that avoids squaring up to our predicament manipulates them: ‘They are treated by metaphysics in fundamentally the same way as by the culture industry’ (M 195/124). Adorno develops this argument through the discussion of a conversation about Beckett that he had with his friend H.G. Adler, a Holocaust survivor and author of a well-known book on life in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. According to Adorno, Adler reacted with ‘violent affect’ against Beckett and said: ‘If Beckett had been in a concentration camp he probably would not write these despairing things; he’d write things which gave people courage [Mut]’ (M 194/124). ³¹ And, presumably, Adler thinks that ‘things that gave people courage’ are hopeful things. Adorno disagrees. He sees Adler’s sentiment as part of the ideological way in which metaphysical concepts are discussed at the time. They are endorsed, because people experience a need for metaphysical solace. His diagnosis of the problem is that

the situations in which people are forced to think ‘positively’ simply in order to survive are themselves situations of compulsion, which force people back on pure self-preservation, and in thinking only what they need to in order to survive in such a situation, to a point where the truth content of what they think is hopelessly undermined and utterly destroyed. (M 194–95/124)

In Adorno’s view, Beckett was lucky, not only because he was spared Adler’s horrific experiences, but also because, having been spared these experiences, he was able to express truthfully the despair that he felt in the face of our predicament and thereby to serve a critical aim. This critical aim is to squarely face the worst possible truth, that is, that the Holocaust happened, and that we still live in a radically evil world, and to think it through.

If there is any way out of this hellish circle—and I would not wish to exaggerate that possibility, being well aware of the weakness and susceptibility of such consciousness—it is probably the ability of the intellect [Geist] to assimilate, to think the last extreme of horror and, in face of this intellectual [geistigen] experience, to gain mastery over it. (M 196/125, translation modified)

The answer, I think, is that contrary to what Adler thought, it is exactly this process of working through and reflecting on the despair occasioned by the Holocaust that can instil courage in people which will enable them to remain critical of the wrong life and to resist it where possible. To see this, we need to understand the relationship between radical hope and courage.

According to Lear, in the most general terms, courage, as a human excellence or virtue, is ‘the capacity for living well with the risks that inevitably attend human existence’ (Lear 2006, 121). So understood, radical hope may be both a necessary constituent and a manifestation of courage (Lear 2006, 123). It is a necessary constituent, because courage may require the capacity to live with conceptual loss, where established structures of meaning and significance no longer apply, and radical hope is required in order to believe in the possibility of conceptual renewal. It is a manifestation of courage, if it is well deployed in order to enable the courageous person to judge well the risks of life. As Lear sees it, Plenty Coups needed radical hope in order to have the courage to lead the Crow into an unknown future, and his capacity to do so well manifested his radical hope in that future. Likewise, Adorno is concerned with the courage to live in the wake of the Holocaust, and this form of courage seems to rely on radical hope, not only for the possibility of continued living, but also for his capacity to resist the wrong life and to fight for a better one with the means of critical theory. Here, Adorno agrees with Kant: ‘Without hope there is no good [Ohne Hoffnung ist kein Gutes]’ (ND 272/276). ³⁴ At the same time, Adorno’s courage in confronting the past, working through and reflecting on the Holocaust, manifests the radical hope that it is possible to liberate oneself from disabling despair in the face of what happened and discloses a new space of future possibility, even if it is completely indeterminate.

At this point, we can return to the distinction between Lear’s and Adorno’s conceptions of radical hope. While Plenty Coups finds in the Crow past ready resources for courage and hope, for Adorno the past is a vast reservoir of devastation and human suffering. Working through the past and understanding it as fully as possible enables Adorno to move from despair to hope, because it ensures that we understand the full force of our predicament and guards against the temptation of ordinary hope. As we have seen, Adorno is aware that ‘the possible’ blocks the path to utopia. As long as we believe that we have enough real or imaginative resources to picture a determinate better, future world, we have not escaped the spell.

Moreover, reflection on the history of the modern world, including a detailed understanding of the processes that led to the Holocaust, enables us to see the historical specificity and contingent character of these processes. We can see that the Holocaust was neither a natural nor a necessary outcome of human history, even if the dialectic of enlightenment establishes a relationship between the pathological practices of self-preservation and the domination of nature on the one hand, and the Holocaust on the other. It is good to know the worst, here understood as the precise details of the horrors of the Holocaust, then, because this knowledge denaturalises it and therefore liberates us by opening up the possibility of an alternative future in which ‘Auschwitz will not repeat itself’ (ND 358/365). In this sense, the negative character of thought (in the Hegelian sense of negating what it encounters as given) is itself a possible source of hope. ³⁵

5. Reasons for hope

In addition, Adorno suggests at least two further reasons for hope: (1) there is an objective possibility of addressing some of the social suffering that afflicts the world because of the development of the forces of production, and (2) some metaphysical experiences offer a promesse de bonheur, which can serve as a placeholder for a future good without itself being that good.

6. Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that Adorno defends a radical conception of hope. It is radical, because it is hope for a better, future world that leaves the character of this world entirely indeterminate, but holds out hope for its possibility and motivates us to resist the wrong world that we inhabit now. Adorno believes that hope must be radical in this sense, because he is committed to a negativism about the good that is epistemic and imaginative: we can neither know nor imagine the good. His conception of hope differs from ordinary hope, Kantian hope, and Lear’s conception of radical hope. It does not have determinate empirical objects or require moral belief in transcendent objects that would warrant hope. And it does not require a belief in the essential goodness of the world, human civilisation or the past. It does require, however, that we understand and explain the radically evil world that we inhabit at the moment, because it is this activity (the explanatory-diagnostic function of critical theory) that facilitates courage and hope (the anticipatory-utopian function of critical theory). Moreover, our best efforts to know the worst are not enough. Adorno clearly recognises an involuntary element in hope. Ultimately, whether we are hopeful is not up to us, but Adorno offers the beginnings of an account of what might make a difference: there are reasons for hope, including the idea that critical thought itself may give rise to hope, hints of the ‘concrete’ possibility of utopia (albeit in the very limited sense described in the section ‘Reasons for hope’ above), and a particular capacity to be affected by the world through metaphysical experience. This is very different from the metaphysical framework that Plenty Coups had at his disposal, and perhaps a more appropriate explanation for the vagaries of hope for those of us who do not share Plenty Coups’ or any other religious commitments.