Not Yet: Thoughts on Hope

Have you ever been going about an otherwise normal day and suddenly felt that something in the experience is slightly off centre? Not in the sense of regretting last night’s takeaway or wishing you had skipped breakfast cake. Something deeper. A small but persistent sense that the world feels like it should be a bit different from how it currently appears or that something in you has not quite shown up yet.

That feeling, according to the philosopher Ernst Bloch, is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. For him there are no moments in life that are ever fully complete. Not because he was predicting the future like some oracle hunched over tea leaves, but because our type of consciousness is structurally incapable of grasping a moment in full. The now is always obscure to itself.

What he meant was that the world will always be partially unknown to us because we are so close to it and because the world itself is unfinished and always changing. At the same time we are partially unknown to ourselves because we too are unfinished and too close to our own becoming to see what we might be capable of. Trying to see the present clearly is like looking into a rear-view mirror and being confronted by the blind spot again and again until the moment passes. Bloch calls this the darkness of the lived moment.

This is where negativity and hope become dialectically entwined. If every moment is incomplete and partly concealed, then every moment also contains unrealised possibilities. The present is not a sealed container. It carries within it little seeds of future worlds that may come to be, but are not yet.

Many years before Bloch, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that all the interests of human reason reduce down to three questions:

What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for?

Without a good answer to the third question the first two start to wobble. If you have nothing to hope for then rejecting reality has no cost. Yet before we sprint into hope-fantasy-land we need to see how these questions interlock. There is a big difference between hoping for something with no foothold in reality and hoping for something grounded in the actual conditions of the world you inhabit and the possibilities that genuinely exist within it.

This is where hope becomes different from optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out fine in the end. It is passive, like sunbathing on the Titanic as it sinks and saying these things probably work themselves out. Hope is active. It is not just a feeling but an orientation to both the present and the future. It is the recognition that the world could become better and that your desire for that better world matters.

Imagine someone who once held a picture of how life was meant to unfold. The steady career path. The partner and kids behind the white picket fence. The long awaited trip to a Disneyland. But reality diverged from the movie in their mind. Their career stumbled, their family split, and Disneyland, turns out to be, a bit of a shithole. So they protected themselves by retreating into cynicism. If you expect nothing, you cannot be disappointed.

The problem here is not that the universe is meaningless. It is that their hope was miscalibrated. Their image of the future was detached from how the world actually functions. When the world refused to conform, they responded by refusing the future altogether.

For Bloch, this disappointment is not a sign that hope is foolish. It is a moment of clarity. It shows the gap between how one imagined the world to be and how it actually is. Disappointment sharpens perception. It forces a recalibration of one’s understanding of reality so that future hope can be rooted rather than imagined. Think back to those questions, what can I know? What ought I do?

Hope, for Bloch, is never passive. It is a cognitive-practical stance. A way of noticing real potentials in the world. The world is not finished. Nature and history are full of tendencies and possibilities that haven’t reached their fuller expression. Bloch calls this the “Noch-Nicht” or the not yet.

Hope is ontological. The world itself is unfinished. Things are what they are and also what they might become.

Hope is cognitive. It is not blind faith but a kind of knowledge. A sensitivity to real openings and trajectories that are already present in art, in social life and in our everyday experiences.

Hope is practical and political. It demands action. Bloch saw it as inseparable from efforts to create a more human world grounded in dignity, freedom and solidarity.

Put more simply, hope is a way of understanding that the present is not complete. There are potentials within existence that have not yet been realised. Bloch uses not yet in many senses. Not actual now. Actual but not yet fully determined. Still not. Expected but unrealised. Conceivable now but not yet possible. Present in a problematic way but still to come in its realisation.

Hope is the consciousness of these not yet forms. It is the refusal to accept the present as the limit of what reality can be, paired with the responsibility to discern which possibilities are genuine and which are fantasies detached from how the world actually works.

So maybe that quiet sense that something in your life or in the world is missing is not a sign that something has gone wrong. Maybe it is the faint signal of the not yet. A reminder that the present is not finished with you and you are not finished with it either.