1. The Basic Structure of Hope
In
one sense, everyone is familiar with hope.
Consider Thomas Aquinas’s example of a dog. If the dog sees a rabbit too far away, it
won’t chase the rabbit, because it has no hope of catching it. But if the quarry is closer, the dog chases
it, hoping to catch it. When the dog
catches the rabbit, she no longer hopes, because she has what she wanted.[1]
Aquinas’s
imagined dog illustrates crucial components of hope. First, the dog wants the rabbit. Since
Socrates, philosophers have taught that people only desire things they judge to
be good. So hope is directed toward the good (or what a person thinks is
good).
Second,
the dog’s desire for the rabbit is for something she does not have. Sometimes we
desire things we already have, as when I desire to be with my family while
eating Thanksgiving dinner with them.
Hope’s desire, unlike desires for things I have already, is usually
directed toward the future.
Is
this always the case? Consider a family
whose loved one was a passenger on an airplane that has gone missing. They have received no news about whether the
plane crashed or about possible survivors.
Perhaps we would say that they hope that their loved one survived the
crash, if indeed there was one. This
seems to be a hope for something in the past rather than the future. We do speak this way (e.g. “I hope she
survived”), but the example confuses what actually happened with our knowledge
of what happened. Whatever happened in
the past is fixed; it isn’t subject
to change or chance. Imagine the family
learns there was a crash and their loved one died. They might wish things had happened otherwise, but they no longer hope that
that things had happened otherwise.
About the family who does not yet know what happened to the missing
plane, it would be more accurate to say they hope they will learn that the
loved one survived. So, yes: hope is
directed toward the future.
Third,
the dog judges that it may catch the
rabbit. Hope’s desire is directed toward
possible things. We don’t hope for things that are impossible
(the rabbit that is too far away) or things that are already achieved (the
rabbit in the dog’s mouth, the family gathered at the table).
Hope,
then, is directed toward possible future
goods (or what a person thinks to be good).
But what is it?
Aquinas
would say that so far we have only described a natural passion, something we
share with higher animals, which must be distinguished from the virtue of
hope. As a passion, hope moves us to
act; it has what Aquinas would call an appetitive function. At the same time, the natural passion of hope
also includes a kind of intellectual judgment; it judges that the desired
future good is possible, neither impossible nor actual. In natural hope, then, there is room for both
appetite and intellect. Aquinas thought
these features of natural hope carried over to the virtue of hope; the virtue
of hope, though focused on something very different than natural hopes, also
combined appetite (of a kind—our desire for friendship with God is both like
and unlike our desires for natural goods) and intellect.
In
one way or another, philosophers who write about hope endorse this
analysis. In hope there is a combination
of desire/feeling/emotion on one side and judgment/rationality/intellect on the
other. And this suggests a question: How
ought the two “parts” of hope be put together?
Should rationality control emotion?
Do the feelings associated with hope overpower reason? I will return to this question later.
We
need to see that if hope is an appetite directed toward possible future goods,
there are going to be many kinds of “hope,” varying according to the ends that
people desire. Think of Gollum, guide and
would-be nemesis for Frodo and Sam in The
Lord of the Rings. Gollum leads the
hobbits on a secret path through the mountains into Mordor, a path that will
expose them to the terror of Shelob.
Gollum hopes Shelob will kill the hobbits and discard their clothing—including
the one ring, which Gollum will then reclaim.
Gollum clearly hopes, in the sense that his appetite is directed to a
possible future “good,” yet his hope is evil.
Ordinarily
we think of hope as a virtue. But hope
can only be a virtue when our appetites are directed toward genuine goods. Though he desires it, possession of the one
ring is not a good for Gollum; in fact, the ring causes his death and desire
for it destroys his soul. It is possible
for human beings to desire false goods and worship false gods.
We
should modify our first analysis of hope.
Hope is directed to possible
future genuine goods.
But
which goods are genuine goods? To return
to Aquinas; he says the natural passion of hope is not the same thing as the
virtue of hope. In a very recent essay,
Charles Pinches quotes Josef Pieper, “It would never occur to a philosopher
unless he were also a Christian theologian, to describe hope as a virtue. For hope is either a theological virtue or
not a virtue at all.”[2] Pinches agrees with Pieper and says that
among philosophers “…few would think of hope as a virtue, that is, something
that perfects us, what we must practice as a habit, be trained in, and work
properly to preserve.”[3] I think this is clearly false.
Historically
speaking, Pinches and Pieper may be right, but in recent years non-Christian
and atheist philosophers have paid attention to hope as a virtue. Jonathan Lear, Jill Graper Hernandez, and
Adrienne Martin are all interested in how hope contributes to a flourishing
human life and how we may train ourselves in it.
We
should not say that only the best and highest good is a genuine good. There are many goods—at the minimum, morally
permissible ends—that human being desire.
We just need to recognize the great diversity among goods. Pinches himself writes: “hope grows from
hope”; that is, the virtue grows out of the passion.[4] We can learn about higher hopes by comparing
them with lower ones.
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