Twenty-four insects on one bush, eighty years after the species was declared extinct.
Hope
Orientation toward a wanted outcome that is possible and not assured - and the question of whether it helps or evades.
- Theme
- Life, death and meaning
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term
- ἐλπίς · elpis
- Term fixed
- c. 1270
In plain terms
Hope requires two things at once: that the outcome is possible, and that it is not guaranteed. Certainty removes it, and so does impossibility.
That middle position is why it is contested. On one account hope is what makes sustained action possible under uncertainty - nobody starts anything that will take twenty years without it.
On another it is a way of avoiding the situation you are actually in. The Stoics classed it with fear as a disturbance about a future that has not happened; Camus called hope an evasion of the absurd; and Nietzsche repeated the ancient reading in which Pandora's jar kept hope back as the last and worst of the evils, because it prolongs the torment.
Both are describing something real, and telling them apart in a given case is the practical difficulty.
As a philosopher would put it
The standard analysis has two conditions: a desire for an outcome and a belief that it is possible but not certain. That is widely regarded as insufficient, since it fits idle wishing as well as substantial hope, and the additional element - variously described as a licensing of imagination, a way of framing the odds, or a stance one adopts - is where the current literature sits.
Aquinas makes hope a theological virtue directed at a future good that is difficult but possible with divine assistance, distinguishing it from presumption and from despair as its two failures.
Bloch's Principle of Hope makes it a forward orientation running through culture and politics, the not-yet as a category of reality. Against this stands a substantial critical tradition: the Stoics treat hope as a passion to be eliminated along with fear, Camus treats it as one of the evasions of the absurd, and Lear's radical hope names the harder case - hope maintained when one cannot yet conceive what the good outcome would look like.
Where you meet it
The Lord Howe Island stick insect was declared extinct in 1920, wiped out by rats from a wrecked ship. It was a large flightless insect, up to fifteen centimetres, known locally as the land lobster.
In 2001 a survey team climbed Ball's Pyramid, a sheer volcanic stack twenty-three kilometres away, on the strength of climbers' reports of insect remains decades earlier. On a single melaleuca bush, on a narrow ledge, they found twenty-four living individuals.
Two pairs were taken for captive breeding in 2003. One female, named Eve, nearly died and was treated with a calcium mixture by a keeper who worked on her through the night. The Melbourne Zoo population subsequently ran to thousands.
The searchers had no evidence beyond an eighty-year-old absence and some second-hand reports. What made the expedition rational was not the probability, which was very low, but that the outcome was possible and worth the climb - which is the structure the concept names.
What is actually disputed
Whether hope is a virtue or an evasion.
The case for is practical: hope sustains action across long horizons where the evidence is insufficient to justify confidence, and without it very little that requires persistence gets done. The case against is that it directs attention to a future that does not exist, and can substitute for engagement with a present that does.
The Stoic and Camusian positions are not despair. Both propose acting well without hope - doing what the situation requires because it is required, and not because it will work.
Lear's radical hope poses the hardest version. Where a way of life has been destroyed, a person may need to hope for a good they cannot yet describe, since the concepts for it have gone with the culture. That is neither optimism nor evidence-based expectation, and whether it is courage or a refusal to face a loss is not settled by anything in the situation.
Commonly confused with
- Faith c. 1270 Faith on most religious accounts involves trust in a person or a promise. Hope is directed at an outcome, and the two are distinguished carefully in the traditions that use both.
Defined against
- Despair The traditional pairing, though the relation is more complicated than it looks: Kierkegaard's despair is compatible with optimism and Camus rejects hope without despairing
Philosophers
- Thomas Aquinas Hope as a theological virtue between presumption and despair
- Epictetus Hope classed with fear as a disturbance about what is not up to us
- Albert Camus Hope as an evasion of the absurd
- Friedrich Nietzsche The ancient reading of hope as the last evil
- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard Hope as inseparable from a relation to the eternal
Works
- Summa Theologiae Hope as a virtue, with its two opposites
- Discourses and Enchiridion The discipline of expectation
- The Myth of Sisyphus The argument that hope evades
- Meditations Acting well without expectation
- Pensées Hope and the wager
- The Consolation of Philosophy Hope written under sentence of death
Schools
- Thomism Where hope is a theological virtue
- Early Stoicism Where it is a passion to be eliminated
- Roman Stoicism Where that becomes daily practice
- Existentialism Where it is treated with suspicion
- Pure Land Buddhism (Jodo) Where hope in another power is the whole path
- Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where the not-yet becomes a political category
Related concepts
Despair 1849 · Possibility c. 330 BC · Meaning of life 1942 · Absurdity 1942 · Faith c. 1270
Hesiod's elpis, left in the jar after the evils escape, is ambiguous in the Greek and has been read both as a consolation and as the last evil; the Christian tradition makes hope a theological virtue, which is where its positive valuation comes from.