welcome to make another world! thanks for choosing to spend some of your time reading some of the ideas i am in the process of developing. i hope you find it stimulating, interesting, and at least on occasion, worthy of critical response. ideas – good ones, at any rate – don’t develop in a vacuum, and there will surely be things you think of while reading these posts that I haven’t. i encourage you to share them with me and the other readers of the blog, for our mutual benefit.
over the course of the next few introductory posts, i will be working out some preliminary thoughts on the nature and moral significance of hope. the basic ideas to be presented have been percolate for long enough. the time seems right to put them out there and see how well they hold up. please take their public availability as an invitation for commentary and criticism.
my aim in this first installment is to develop a distinction between two basic classes of hope – what i shall refer to as casual hope and profound hope – and to articulate the difference between the two. this is an important first step, as the focus in the ensuing posts will be strictly on profound hope. indeed, as shall become apparent by the end of this post, casual hope is probably undeserving of inclusion under the category of hope at all. but more significantly still, i will establish the basis for the claim that profound hope carries moral weight.
in recent years hope has received a considerable amount of attention. academically, hope has been given extensive philosophical treatment in the pragmatist-oriented circles in which i move. rorty, west, green, hookway, westbrook, cooke, fishman & mccarthy, and koopman, to name only a few, each have attended closely to hope in their recent work, taking it up in manners as diverse as showing hope to be an a priori condition of inquiry, a central feature of democracy, and the basis of meliorism. the roots of these inquiries can be traced back to the writings of the “classical” pragmatists, primarily peirce and dewey. most recently and publicly, however, hope featured as a centerpiece of obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
i know of no occasion in which obama explained what he meant by the term, but he seemed to lean on a popular understanding of it. obama’s usage closely linked hopes with dreams. more specifically, hope was regularly tied to achieving “the american dream.” the significance of hope in this context seems to be that it serves to keep the american dream alive for those who possess it. the point is not that sufficient hope is causally efficacious to instantiate the american dream for the one who hopes, such that all that is required to come into an upwardly mobile career and accompanying house with a two-car garage, white picket fence, 2.56 children, and a family dog is simply to hope for it. rather, the point is that a lack or loss of hope undermines the possibility of achieving anything resembling the american dream, whatever that may mean for any given individual. (while the range of what it may mean specifically is extensive, given the plurality of american dreamers, i suspect there is probably some set of basic general properties, none essential, but some combination of which must always be identifiable, such as stability or sustainability, opportunity, novelty. generalizing from the particular case of the american dream to hopes more broadly, and without arguing for it here, i think an important point is to be made about objects of hope. namely, that while not all objects of hope are identical in light of the fact that there is no essential set of features any given object of hope must possess, there are features, which if present, will prevent certain objects from being reckoned legitimate aims of hope. i highlight this here because in a later post i will develop an argument for it grounded in the logic of hope, the significance of which is that not every object which admits of the features i will outline in the intervening posts can serve as a legitimate object of hope.)
from this it seems that the link between hopes and dreams has something to do with motivation. if one lacks sufficient hope that the dream may be fulfilled, one is unlikely to undertake its pursuit in the first place. for such circumstances evince a lack of confidence that one’s efforts will pay off in the way desired. or to put it another way, what distinguishes a hope in obama’s sense from a dream is that the latter represents the object or aim of one’s hope, while the hope itself represents something – although exactly what i am not entirely sure – related to the motivation to persist in attempting to achieve the aim embodied in the dream. as i take it, hope, in obama’s use of the term, is an attitude closely resembling confidence in the possibility of something. insofar forth, then, it may reasonably be contrasted with despair over the perceived impossibility of something. furthermore, from this it is also clear that hope involves an orientation toward something not currently present. one simply does not hope for what one already has. one may of course hope for the perpetuation of a present object, but then the force of such a hope is directed at the perpetuation, which by definition cannot yet be present, and not the object to be perpetuated. so hope hinges on a privation of sorts. it also depends upon desire. it would be absurd to suggest that one hopes for what one despises, fears, or cannot coexist with, in short, that one hopes contrary to desire. even in the case of someone who hopes to quit smoking, but finds the desire for nicotine overwhelming, the hope is not counter to desire insofar as the second order desire to quit is privileged by the agent over the first order desire to maintain nicotine levels in the bloodstream. this observation points to yet another feature of hope. by its nature, hope is never unintentional. it may be more or less well focused, but it never comes about accidentally or without making some kind of conscious commitment to it. this suggests that hope is also related to willing.
although the foregoing analysis is by no means definitive, let’s pause and consolidate the results of the inquiry thus far. hope is an intentionally adopted motivational attitude which is optimistic about the possibility of some object of desire not presently enjoyed. this is quite a bit to work with already. nevertheless, i believe there is an important distinction still to be drawn. the distinction i have in mind is the one indicated above, between casual and profound hope.
both casual and profound hope fit the summary description above. the critical difference between the two is that in the case of the former, there is little or nothing of significance at stake for the one who holds the casual hope. this is why it is accurately characterized as casual. casual hopes are such that the loss of the object of hope entails no existential disruption for the hoper. the reason for this is that the casual hoper is minimally invested in seeing the object of hope realized, precisely because there is nothing significant at stake for her regarding the object of casual hope. as a consequence, casual hope is characteristically passive; though its realization would be happily received, it does little more than sit and wait. it is not marked by active pursuit of its object, quite often because the object is not something one can do anything to bring about, but also because the object is such that its value is not significant enough to motivate active pursuit. accordingly, while it is welcomed, nevertheless, the realization of the object of casual hope is never a momentous event. the casual hoper’s benefit is advanced, but only marginally so, and in a qualitatively impoverished manner. often the object rather quickly loses its initial luster, comes to be taken for granted, and even discarded in relatively short order.
casual hope in the sense i understand it conforms to many everyday expressions of hope which we all use. for instance, we hope the train isn’t running late, hope the weather holds for a few more hours, hope our favorite performer will tour in our town, or that we hit the lottery this time, and even, as I put it at the outset of this post, “hope you find [this blog] stimulating, interesting, and at least on occasion, worthy of critical response.” it seems to me that hope in this sense is probably undeserving of the name. it resembles something closer to mere wishing or simple desiring. when the casual hoper says “i hope that X,” roughly all she is saying is, “i would be pleased if X.” in other words, hope in this case is the expression of a minor satisfaction not yet met, or a psychological state of mild desire, the value of which, while positive, nonetheless fails to motivate its active pursuit. though not because it is rooted in desire and satisfaction, casual hope carries no moral weight; whatever else it may offer, from the preceding it should be clear that it provides no mooring in the midst of an existential crisis.
hope deserving of the name does, however. and here’s why. hope deserving of the name – what I am calling profound hope – takes as its object something of great import. that is to say, there are real and significant stakes for the profound hoper. objects of profound hope are not easily had, but lay beyond the scope of one’s immediate powers to bring them about. as a result, they necessitate the imaginative, intelligent construction of means-ends strategies for their realization, which almost always involve the coordination of cooperative efforts, resources, expertise, authority, and goodwill of a host of others, even though those others may not share the same hope, or even be aware of the hoper’s commitment to it. thus, profound hope has a temporal career. it is not had all at once, but is a complex, gradually unfolding process. consequently, profound hope requires patience and focus. because means-ends strategies almost always involve unforeseen setbacks, steadfast determination in the wake of calamity and ongoing persistence in the face of uncertainty are also characteristic of profound hope, as is creative adaptability. the latter is indispensable for navigating the inevitable contingencies, and even processes of revision of the intended object of hope according as conditions suggest. but appropriate revision depends upon keen perception of shifting conditions and an acute sensitivity to their relevance for the hoped for object. in light of all this, while profound hope is optimistic, it is nevertheless sober. it takes not its object for granted, and to the extent that its object may at any time come under revision, it must have the courage to undertake its pursuit even though the object’s status as worthy of achievement is only ever provisional. that is to say, the profound hoper must simultaneously persist in the face difficulty, and also be prepared to sacrifice her object should conditions require it.
all this chit-chat about virtues of character may seem abstract, and even utterly beside the point. To bring out the relevance of character, let me bring the discussion down to earth a bit by answering the following question: what does it mean to talk, as I have done repeatedly above, about “pursuing” a profound hope? what exactly does such a pursuit involve?
it is an important feature of profound hope that its object exceeds one’s immediate powers to bring it about. while doing so requires that the hoper bring to bear all her relevant resources, those fail to be sufficient on their own. the various resources of others must also be secured and coordinated with one’s own and with each other. this is done not simply on the level of interpersonal relationships, though that is certainly involved. it also incorporates varying forms of institutional support. thus, practically speaking, pursuing profound hope involves the intelligent coordination of a wide range of often very difficult personal choices and commitments, including, but not restricted to education, political and religious affiliation and activity, economic planning and execution, community development on multiple levels from local to national and even international, various social alliances, decisions regarding living conditions and what may be sacrificed and what remains necessary. one’s profound hope guides the organization of these overlapping processes and commitments.
hence, profound hope does not reduce simply to the amalgamation of virtues of character; it requires some complicated and demanding, intelligently directed practical activity across a broad spectrum of highly consequential social dimensions. nevertheless, profound hope is nothing without virtues. more importantly, however, as with the relevant practical activities and commitments, it is the presence of hope that brings together and coordinates these virtues, that draws them out, puts them to work, focuses them, and thereby unifies them. in doing so, hope serves to cultivate and develop the virtues.
it is in good part because hope surfaces one’s virtuous nature that profound hope can serve to ground one amidst the most decentering experiences of loss and trauma, when the exterior of things seems only to spell disaster and mock us for being in such straits. but more broadly, insofar as profound hope serves to draw out and activate the virtues as well as determine and coordinate a wide range of personal activities, relationships, and commitments, functionally, profound hopes are unifying principles of selfhood. this is what gives profound hope its moral weight. this is why profound hope is hope worthy of the name. in the remaining installments on hope, “hope” shall refer to profound hope.
