Nietzsche and Camus on Hope

Ok so let me begin with Nietzsche’s take on hope, which is, in many ways, pretty harsh actually. I mean his great character Zarathustra is pretty clear on this: He’s made to say this, he says: “Do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes!” And in his book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche tells us pretty much the same thing himself; there he says that he’s against all forms of hope that have to do with future blessedness and justice. 

Now why’s he so hard on hope? Well, as he says elsewhere, it’s because what hope does is it prolongs the torments of man. 

And actually, to get more specific, he says this in the context of a discussion about the mythological story of Pandora’s Box. So the myth basically goes like this: Zeus gave Pandora and her husband a jar for their wedding present. But they were told not to open it. Pandora however, was overly curious and wanted to know what was inside. So she lifted its lid, and when she did, all the evils of the world (like sickness, toil and sin) flew out and were released upon humanity. Seeing what was going on, Pandora shut it as fast as she could; and she did manage to keep one last evil from getting out, and that was hope. 

Ok now Nietzsche’s interpretation of this is that it’s not a good thing that hope didn’t get a chance to fly away. And that’s because hope, locked up with us as it is, keeps us delusional, it gives us the false illusion that we’re able to transcend our existence and its inherent tragedies. It keeps us believing, hoping, that a better world beyond this one exists and that that’s where our attention and energy should be. 

Actually it’s interesting, Nietzsche thinks that Zeus had this in mind the whole time! That’s to say, his plan was to leave us with hope so as to punish us. And when you think about it, it’s actually a perfect punishment, cause it’s an unending one. As long as it’s with us, people will always resort to hope. This is what makes hope so malevolent and nefarious for Nietzsche, it’s the gift that keeps on giving! Hope always offers the temporary assuagement of pain by promising salvation later. In this sense, it’s a palliative, but like a palliative, it keeps us blind to the human condition with all its terrible aspects. It undermines the importance of our present and our only life. 

Now for Nietzsche this is simply not the right approach to life. We have to find a way to make life bearable as it is, not adopt a false consciousness about it, not jump into our fantasies. No, actually it’s stronger than this even; for Nietzsche we have to learn to face life heroically and joyfully, despite life’s terrible constitution! We have to learn to love what there is and what we have, and stop throwing our life away by obsessing about what isn’t here and what we don’t have. And the only way to do this is to stop taking the last remaining evil in that box to be the greatest worldly good. As the great Greek writer Kazantzakis said, we must learn to conquer the last and the greatest temptation of all, hope! 

Actually, now that I think about it, Camus had a somewhat similar view to Nietzsche, which is not surprising, considering that Nietzsche was a big influence on him. Anyway, so Camus follows Nietzsche in claiming that hope, especially religious or other worldly hope is the worst of all evils. For Camus, the cold fact of the matter is that human existence is absurd, there is no ultimate meaning to it, and there is no God to give it one. So there is no salvation. So hope is illusory, it’s a form of wishful thinking, and in this sense, it’s a form of cowardice. And actually Camus criticizes religious thinkers like Kierkegaard for not having the courage to face absurdity head on and instead taking that religious leap of faith. Better to face the human condition honestly and bravely than evade it by hoping for something outside of it!  

Actually religious hope isn’t the only kind of hope Camus criticizes. He also criticizes the hope associated with social utopias. You know, the kind the asks us to hope for or have faith in some great cause beyond ourselves, in some great ideal state to come, and Marxism or communism is a good example here. The hope, in other words, that asks us to sacrifice the present for an unknown future. No, both religious hope and political hope are problematic for Camus because they take us away from the here and now of our lives, because they distract and prevent us from appreciating our bodies, our senses, and just how beautiful this life is, despite and because of, its futility. 

Ok, but I should mention something else here. So Camus wasn’t entirely without a notion of hope. 

Yes, he’s against all forms of hope that yearn for transcendence or for the eternal, but he’s not against what we could call a finite or earthly hope. This is the kind of hope that lives between people, and links them together. It’s one that’s characterized by human solidarity and love. This is the kind of hope that doesn’t want to escape the world, rather, it wants to respond to it! It’s when we choose to believe in each other to work together to do the best we can for one another, despite the ultimate absurdity of it all. And can there be a greater testament to the authenticity of our love than that? Namely, one that commits to another person, all while under the shadow of death, where everything is quickly brought to an end.