The Value of Hope - A Message for My Classmates

My final presentation is on Hope and consists of the video and post below. In putting this together, I had a jumble of thoughts that I felt the need to express in my Grandfather Philosophy video series. Together the four videos amount to my Thanksgiving message to my family and friends, which I am sharing with you, in the event you have any interest.

GP #14 - Seeing a Better World (9:35) Understanding that it is your mode of thinking that ties hope and fear and gratitude together. https://youtu.be/tdIqktOtaBs  

GP #15 – The Value of Hope (18:43) How to use the positive emotion of hope to be happy and successful.  https://youtu.be/cYjZeuyofw8

 GP # 16 – Que Sera Sera (9:14) How to overcome the negative emotion of fear and stop worrying. https://youtu.be/Ony0UoaSPCk

 GP #17 – On Being Thankful (9:24) How the positive emotion of gratitude can help you be happier.  https://youtu.be/rXluQbp7tFI 

 

The Philosophical History of Hope    

Hope has a long history in philosophy. There is an excellent article on hope in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Most of this lecture is taken directly from it. It traces the philosophical history of hope from the ancient philosophers, through the Christian treatment of hope, to the 17^th and 18^th century philosophers, and on to the existentialists and pragmatists. That is a journey I am not prepared to take. But I want to highlight a few things we would see along the way.

There is a standard definition or account of hope in analytic philosophy. Its focus is on two criteria of hope, a desire for an outcome and a belief in that outcome’s possibility. These criteria are independently necessary and jointly sufficient for ‘hope that….’ The object of hope must be desired by the hoper, and the object of hope must fall within a range of physical possibility which includes the improbable but excludes the certain and the merely logically possible.

So under this definition, you can’t hope for something that you believe is not possible, or that is certain. I suppose we’d classify the first as just wishful thinking. Only the belief of the hoping person about the possibility of the object is relevant, independently of whether this belief is true: a person can hope for an object they believe to be possible even if the object is in fact impossible.

Of course, this definition is picked to death, and discussing all the criticisms is beyond this lecture, but a couple of points need to be mentioned.

One concern is that the standard account fails to explain how hope can have special motivating force in difficult circumstances, especially when the probability of the desired outcome is low. This objection is based on the idea that hope is closely connected to our agency. One writer claims that even in cases where we cannot bring anything about to promote the hoped-for end, hope is “a way of positively and expansively inhabiting one’s agency”, and our “energy  … is  oriented toward the future.”

Another writer argues that we should consider two more elements in addition to belief and desire or attraction: first, the agent must see or treat their belief about the possibility of the outcome’s occurring as licensing hopeful activities, i.e., as not advising against some specific activities. Second, the agent must treat their attraction to the outcome as a practical reason to engage in the activities characteristic of hope.

Furthermore, hope can have intrinsic value even where there is no instrumental value; i.e., where hoping cannot contribute to bringing about the desired object.  In one writer’s view, this intrinsic value pertains to hope because hoping involves mental imaging. Mental imaging is pleasurable in itself. Hope has epistemic value because it increases one’s self-understanding. And hope has intrinsic worth because it is constitutive of love towards others and towards oneself, which are intrinsically valuable activities. It is in virtue of mental imaging that hope is intimately connected to love, because spending mental energy in thinking about the well-being of another person is constitutive of loving them.

For me, I am taking as my working definition of hope as the standard account plus a recognition of the instrumental and intrinsic value of hoping. The noun hope is a desire for an outcome and a belief in that outcome’s possibility, where the object of hope falls within a range of physical possibility which includes the improbable but excludes the certain and the merely logically possible. The verb hope, to hope that … is a license to engage in hopeful activities. It is a practical reason to engage in the activities characteristic of hope. And it makes you feel better.

The history of hope in philosophy begins with the ancient Greeks. In early Greek thought, hope is often seen as an attitude of those who have insufficient knowledge or are easily swayed by wishful thinking. It thus has a primarily negative reputation as an attitude that (at least potentially) misleads actions and agents. The questionable nature of hope is seen with the myth of Pandora. It is an origin myth, an explanation for the beginning of something. It explains why there is evil in the world. Pandora was the first human woman. She was a curse of Zeus on mankind. He had punished Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans, and he decided to punish mankind as well. He (or Hermes) made her out of earth and water. Hermes gave her “a bitch’s mind and a knavish nature.” He gave her the gift of speech to tell lies, and the mind and nature of a treacherous dog. Other gods gave her talents; i.e., beauty, charm, music, sex appeal, and also curiosity and persuasion. Pandora means “all gifts.” When she married, Zeus gave her a beautiful jar (mistranslated in the 16^th century as “box”) but forbid her opening it, which he knew she would because of her nature and her curiosity. When she did, out came ghostly creatures; disease, poverty, misery, sadness, death, and all the evils of the world. Everything escaped the jar but Hope. Man had lived without worry until woman opened the jar. Can you see the comparison to the story to Eve and the apple and the consequences?

Why did Hope stay in the jar? One common story is that it was Zeus’s will. He wanted people to suffer in order to understand that they shouldn’t disobey the gods. In some versions of the myth, Hope leaves the jar and touches the wounds created by the evils. In some it remains in the jar separate from the evils and is good by comparison. There are many competing interpretations of why Hope remained in the jar: was it to keep hope available for humans or, rather, to keep hope from man? Is Hope consequently to be regarded as good (“a comfort to man in his misery and a stimulus rousing his activity”) or as evil (“idle hope in which the lazy man indulges when he should be working honestly for his living”). This is a question which philosophers answer differently.   

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle present generally positive attitudes toward hope. Socrates describes “pleasures of anticipation”, that is, expectations of future pleasures, that are called hopes. One commentator argues, in the case of such pleasures of anticipation, what we enjoy at present is only a thought. As there can be a discrepancy between the thought that we enjoy and what is in fact going to happen, the pleasure can be true—in which case it seems appropriate to say that the corresponding hope can be rationally endorsed—or false. Plato also presents hope as essential to human agency. Aristotle connects hope to the virtue of courage. He says:

“The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.” Thus, even though not every hopeful person is courageous, every courageous person is hopeful. Hopefulness creates confidence, which, if derived from the right sources, can lead to the virtue of courage.

It seems to me that these three are recognizing both the instrumental and intrinsic value of hope.

Hope receives a less favorable treatment by the Stoic philosophers. Seneca emphasizes hope’s relation to fear.* He writes that “[t]hey are bound up with one another, unconnected as they may seem. Widely different though they are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

According to Seneca, we should avoid both fear and hope and instead focus on the present and cultivate tranquility of the soul.

Hope plays a large role in Christian philosophy and theology. Christian philosophers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas analyze hope as one of the most central virtues of a believer: Hope, precisely in virtue of its capacity to justify action in a way which is not bound to knowledge, is a part of rational faith. I am going to skip over this. If you want to know more, go to the Stanford article.

In 17th and 18th-century philosophy, hope is discussed by most philosophers as a part of their general theories of motivation and cognition, often discussed as a “passion”, i.e., as a fundamentally non-cognitive attitude (even though it might have a belief component). This implies a moral psychology which classifies emotions and desires together as passions that generate action, of which hope is usually conceived as a species. Except for Spinoza, the philosophers of this period accepted some version of the standard account, that hope is based on uncertainty in belief together with a representation of an object as desirable. As a result, hope was seen as a motivating factor in human agency that is neutral, as it can lead to both rational and irrational action.  

According to Descartes, hope is a weaker form of confidence. It consists in a desire (a representation of an outcome to be both good for us and possible) together with a disposition to think of it as likely but not certain. This means that hope and anxiety always accompany each other. 

Spinoza defines the passion, the emotion of hope, as a form of pleasure or joy that is mingled with sadness (due to the uncertainty of the outcome. In contrast to more modern definitions, Spinoza distinguishes the pleasure that is involved in hope from desire. Hope is thus not necessarily connected to desire, but rather a way in which the mind is affected by the idea of a future event. In contrast to Descartes, Spinoza understands hope as fundamentally irrational. He argues that it must be the result of false belief, inasmuch as it does not correctly represent that everything is governed by necessity. Additionally, Spinoza describes hope as one of the causes of superstition, especially as it is always accompanied by fear. Such fear necessarily precludes it from being intrinsically good. This is also the reason why we should attempt to make ourselves independent from hope.

I am going to conclude my look at the philosophical history of hope in the 17th and 18th century, skipping Hume and Kant. For philosophers after Kant, the role of hope is disputed. There were two distinct approaches. On one hand, there were authors like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Camus who rejected hope as expression of a misguided relationship to the world that is unable to face the demands of human existence. On the other hand, there were authors like Kierkegaard Marcel who saw hope to be a means to overcome the limitations of ordinary experience.

*The connection between hope and fear is also expressed by Spinoza. From the Ethics: Hope is an inconstant pleasure, arising from the idea of something past or future, whereof we to a certain extent doubt the issue ( E3DefEm.12). Fear is an inconstant pain arising from the idea, of something past or future, whereof we to a certain extent doubt the issue (E3DefEm.13). Explanation.--From these definitions it follows, that there is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope. For he, who depends on hope and doubts concerning the issue of anything, is assumed to conceive something, which excludes the existence of the said thing in the future; therefore he, to this extent, feels pain; consequently, while dependent on hope, he fears for the issue. Contrariwise he, who fears, in other words doubts, concerning the issue of something which he hates, also conceives something which excludes the existence of the thing in question; to this extent he feels pleasure, and consequently to this extent he hopes that it will turn out as he desires.

Confidence is pleasure arising from the idea of something past or future, wherefrom all cause of doubt has been removed (E3DefEm.14). Despair is pain arising from the idea of something past or future, wherefrom all cause of doubt has been removed (E3DefEm.15).  Explanation.--Thus confidence springs from hope, and despair from fear, when all cause for doubt as to the issue of an event has been removed: this comes to pass, because man conceives something past or future as present and regards it as such, or else because he conceives other things, which exclude the existence of the causes of his doubt. For, although we can never be absolutely certain of the issue of any particular event it may nevertheless happen that we feel no doubt concerning it. For we have shown, that to feel no doubt concerning a thing is not the same as to be quite certain of it. Thus it may happen that we are affected by the same emotion of pleasure or pain concerning a thing past or future, as concerning the conception of a thing present….