Hope

Early Christianity

Hope is one of the three abiding theological virtues, alongside faith and love, and it is grounded not in wishful thinking but in the promise of God and the resurrection. It is a confident endurance: 'we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.' Such hope 'does not put us to shame,' because it rests on a gift already given.

Letter to the Romans 5:1–5; First Letter to the Corinthians 13:13.

Christian (Patristic)

Hope has two objects only — the mercy of God for our sins and the gift of eternal life — and it depends entirely on faith and cannot exist without love. Right hope is directed toward the eternal city, not the goods of the earthly one, which are always slipping away. To hope for what one does not love, or to hope in one's own strength rather than in grace, is to hope wrongly.

Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love (c. 421).

Scholasticism

Hope is a theological virtue whose object is a future good that is difficult but possible to attain — namely eternal happiness and the divine help needed to reach it. As a passion it belongs to the irascible appetite, reaching toward an arduous good; as a virtue it perfects the will's confident movement toward God. Its opposing vices are despair, which denies the good is attainable, and presumption, which expects it without the proper means.

Summa Theologiae, II-II, qq. 17–22.

Rationalism

Hope is merely 'an inconstant joy, arising from the image of a future or past thing whose outcome we to some extent doubt,' and it is inseparably paired with fear. Because both spring from inadequate ideas and a lack of knowledge, the free person governed by reason strives to be guided by neither. The more we understand things as necessary, the less we are tossed between hope and fear.

Ethics (1677), Part III, definitions of the affects.

German idealism / critical philosophy

'What may I hope?' is one of the three great questions of reason, and its answer is practical rather than theoretical. Because morality commands us to pursue the highest good — virtue rewarded with happiness — we are rationally entitled to hope for the conditions that make it possible: God and immortality, postulated by practical reason. Hope is thus not idle wishing but a rational requirement of the moral life.

Critique of Pure Reason (1781), 'Canon of Pure Reason'; Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Genealogical critique

Reinterpreting the myth of Pandora, Nietzsche calls hope 'the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torment.' What men take to be the one good remaining in the jar is in truth what keeps them bound to suffering, tricking them into enduring life instead of affirming it honestly. Genuine strength affirms existence as it is — amor fati — rather than leaning on the consolations of a hoped-for beyond.

Human, All Too Human (1878), §71, 'Hope'.

Marxist / utopian philosophy

Hope is the fundamental 'directing act' of human consciousness, oriented toward the 'Not-Yet-Become' — the unrealized possibilities latent in reality and history. Far from private consolation, 'educated hope' (docta spes) reads the utopian surplus in dreams, art, myth and revolution, driving humanity toward a homeland it has never yet had. Being itself is unfinished, a process pregnant with a future that hope helps to deliver.

The Principle of Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1954–1959).

Christian existentialism

Hope must be sharply distinguished from optimism and from mere desire for a specific outcome; it is not 'I hope that X' but an unconditional 'I hope in Thee for us.' Arising in situations of captivity, trial, or despair, genuine hope is a creative, relational act of the whole person, a refusal to calculate the odds and treat the future as closed. It is bound to fidelity, love and the mystery of being rather than to the problem of predicting results.

Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope (1944).

Absurdism

Camus treats a certain kind of hope with suspicion: the hope that appeals to another life or a hidden meaning is a way of evading the absurd, a 'leap' that betrays lucidity. The absurd hero, like Sisyphus, must live 'without appeal,' refusing false consolation while still saying yes to life and revolting against fate. Yet in refusing metaphysical hope he keeps a this-worldly resolve — 'one must imagine Sisyphus happy.'

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942); The Rebel (1951).

Dissident political thought

Hope is 'a state of mind, not a state of the world' — an orientation of the spirit and heart that is not the same as optimism about how things will turn out. It is 'the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out,' and it is what makes people capable of struggling for good causes even when success looks unlikely. Such hope is a deeper source of meaning than any calculation of probable outcomes.

Disturbing the Peace (1986); Letters to Olga (1983).

Prophetic pragmatism

Hope is distinct from optimism: optimism reads the available evidence and expects things to improve, but hope acts for justice in the teeth of the evidence, especially out of the Black prophetic and blues traditions. 'To be a prophetic pragmatist is to have hope,' a courageous, tragicomic engagement that keeps faith with the oppressed without guarantees. Rooted in love and struggle, such hope is a moral practice rather than a prediction.

The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989); Hope on a Tightrope (2008).

Philosophy / psychoanalysis

In the face of cultural devastation, Lear identifies 'radical hope' — a hope directed toward a good that transcends one's present ability even to understand it. Drawing on the Crow leader Plenty Coups, who faced the collapse of his people's entire way of life, he argues that such hope is courageous rather than naive: it commits to the bare conviction that 'something good will emerge' even when the old concepts of the good no longer apply. It is a virtue for living at the limits of one's world.

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006).