An Age of Anxiety — On Hope and Cognition

Not only love but hope, too, generates its own kind of cognition. Yet unlike love, hope is oriented not toward what already is but toward what is to come. Hope perceives what does not yet exist. The temporality of hope is not pastness but futurity. The cognition of hope faces the future, not the past. As "a passion for the possible," hope sets its gaze on what does not yet exist, on what has not yet been born. Hope opens the future's possibility within the present.
Following the Italian philosopher and theologian Anselmus Cantuariensis's famous formulation of "faith in pursuit of cognition" — "I believe so that I may understand" — Jürgen Moltmann said, "Hope in pursuit of cognition: I hope so that I may understand." Hope expands the soul toward a great object. Hope, therefore, is an excellent medium of cognition.
Luther, in his lectures on Romans (1516), reflected on a thinking that is sustained by hope. "The apostle must, regarding all things, philosophize and reflect differently from philosophers and metaphysicians. The philosopher looks at the present form of a thing and contemplates only its properties and its essentiality (Wesenheit). But the apostle takes his eyes off the present form, the properties, and the essentiality of things, and looks toward the future. Instead of speaking about the essence of the creature, or its operation, passivity, activity, and movement, he speaks about (…) the 'expectation of the creature' (Expectatio Creaturae)." One who hopes does not place his attention on the essence of a thing, on its pastness or its presentness (presentiam rerum), but on the future, on the future possibility it carries. Hope-thinking does not consist in grasping but in foreseeing or sensing in advance. Hope opens the realm of the possible before we have set any concrete goal. "Oh, the foretaste of the future! Rejoice in the future, not in the past! Write the myth of the future!
Live in hope! Blessed moments! And then drop the curtain again and return your thoughts firmly to the next, fixed goal!" Without hope we are confined to the existing or to a bad thing right in front of us. Only hope produces meaningful action that brings something new into being in the world.
Moltmann said that hope-thinking does not see reality with "the night-eyes of Minerva's owl." "Minerva's owl" is Hegel's metaphor, indicating that philosophy recognizes only what has already congealed into history — only the existing. "Philosophy that thinks the world makes its appearance only after reality has finished forming and preparing itself. (…)
If philosophy merely paints its grey over with grey, the figure of life grows old, and the grey, left as it is, cannot be made young again — it can only be cognized. 'Minerva's owl' takes flight only at dusk." Hegel says philosophy lacks the ability to grasp what is to come. "Grey painted on grey" is the color of "the existing."
Philosophy is Nach-Denken (thinking-after), not Vor-Denken (thinking-ahead). It is not prospective but retrospective. By contrast, the thinking of hope sees reality with its focus on a possibility that does not yet exist. Philosophy as "thinking-ahead" is, as the German philosopher Karl Ludwig Michelet objected to Hegel in their dialogue, "the cock's crow at the morning of a new sun, announcing the world's rejuvenated form."

In messianic hope-thinking, even what has passed is not closed off or trapped within its own pastness.
What is past also faces the future, faces what is to come, and dreams forward. But "essence" does not dream.
Essence ends with the existing and is closed. The one who hopes finds, within things, the dream-content hidden in them, and reads it as a secret sign of the future. He looks even at what has already passed with the dreamer's eyes. Awakening transforms his consciousness. "In fact, awakening is a fine instance of remembrance. It is the case of having succeeded in remembering the nearest, the most ordinary, and the most self-evident things." The French writer Marcel Proust wrote about experimentally rearranging the furniture in a half-asleep state in the morning, which Bloch described as
"the darkness of the lived moment." Within what already exists, there is knowledge not yet conscious to itself, and such knowledge must be secured collectively, on the historical plane. The process that promotes this knowledge has the structure of awakening. The dream is a tool of cognition. Benjamin sends things into the deep layer of dream in order to draw out the secret language of hope. The meaning of past things does not vanish in the place and position where they once existed. That meaning dreams — that is, hopes — and leaps over the fence of its own history. The 19th-century Pariser Passagen (Paris Arcades) emerged from industrial production and capitalism, but they harbored what could not be resolved within their own internal capitalist, industrial order. "Every era carries this dream-facing side, this child-like side."
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The thinking Benjamin speaks of is the power that opens up "the enormous force of history," a force that lies dormant within the "once upon a time" that appears in classical historical narration.
In the dreams and hopes of things, Benjamin becomes a "dream interpreter," observing a "specially secret world of resemblances" in which things forge "contradictory connections" and reveal "unspecified relations." In this Benjamin resembles Proust. For Proust, the dream reveals a true inner world that exists behind things. The dreamer enters a deeper stratum of "being (des Sein)" in which life ceaselessly draws new threads from between "events of being (Ereignis)" and weaves them into a dense fabric of relations. Truth produces astonishing encounters. This truth occurs at the moment when the dreamer "takes two different objects and creates a connection between them," or, "as life so often does, brings forth something common between two senses, opening up a common essence (Essenz)."