Habits of Hope: A Pragmatic Theory (review)

Hoping is an activity of pursuing an end by promoting the growth of agency, whether individual or social. (71)

Practical hope, Shade contends, is a necessity of life. It can save us from fear and despair. Unconditioned hope, however, is neither justified by our experience nor productive of improved futures. In Habits of Hope, Shade persuasively argues for the necessity of sustaining hope in a grounded and practical way, while simultaneously showing that unconditioned or blind hope can be debilitating and destructive. For Shade, the American Pragmatists lead us to a theory of hope in which hope is, and must be, practical and productive. He demands that "hopes be practical in being realizable so they do not drain our resources" (19).

To some, this account of hope may at first seem unnecessarily limited. Isn't hope supposed to take us beyond perceived possibilities? Isn't it supposed to shatter the practical and help us dream of, and work for, new and different possibilities? Yes, and Shade's pragmatic account of hope makes it a stronger tool to do just that.

The successful realization of hopes, aided by making hopes practical and continuous with other activities, can be, if properly developed in light of habits, productive of a disposition to act in a hopeful way. Consequently, I will argue that nurturing the life of hope, especially its dimension of hopefulness . . . helps us reconstruct ourselves and our societies as productive, intelligently growth-oriented agents. A pragmatic view of human nature thus highlights hope's power as a tool for human self-construction and reconstruction. (11)

Shade begins by providing a clean and succinct account of pragmatism and its attention to contextualism, experimentalism, and meliorism. This leads to an account of hope that is attentive to particular contexts and possibilities, simultaneously focusing on a warranted habit of hopefulness and guiding one's responses to the world in such a way as to sustain us through difficulties without falling into a passive hoping for a better world. Pragmatic hopes are "rooted in actual existential conditions, which include actual individual and social habits" (22). This leads Shade to provide an account of a pragmatic view of the self. Like pragmatic hope, the pragmatic self is found in, and conditioned by, its particular situatedness. It is also an agent that acts on and changes its situatedness. For the pragmatist, intelligent modification of one's environment is the motivation and purpose of inquiry. Inquiry results in habits of transaction that have proved successful. While there is a risk of getting stuck in habits that are no longer productive, development of habits is nonetheless the chief means for successful transactions between a self and its environment and the best way to prepare for necessary future changes and adaptations. "Rather than being liabilities, pragmatists argue, habits are our greatest abilities, making complex interaction—including control and creation of environment—possible. Instead of being inherently restrictive, they are expansive powers of development and growth. . . . We develop habits through our interaction with the environment. Engagement with the environment shapes and structures human plasticity into powerful, purposive modes of activity" (26). The habit of hopefulness, like the habit of critical inquiry, can enable us to deal with the difficult and problematic.

Shade grounds this discussion of hope and hopefulness by bringing in real-life examples—a therapist suffering from depression who resorts to electroconvulsive therapy, an African-American teenager coming from the poverty of his inner city life working and aspiring to attend an Ivy League university, and several stories of people facing terminal cancer. These concrete examples serve well to show the difficulties and messiness involved in forming, maintaining, and acting on hope. They also show the importance of finding ways to do so.

Faith, then, indicates a willingness to act on a belief or in pursuit of an end, even...