Jack Kwong (Appalachian State University), "The Phenomenology of Hope"
American Philosophical Quarterly, 2022
In a couple of recent papers, I have defended the idea that hope is polysemous in that it can refer either to hoping or to being hopeful (Kwong 2020; 2022). To see that these two senses of hope are distinct, consider that a person can hope for an outcome but not feel at all hopeful that such an outcome will obtain. Suppose you just learned that a friend was in a plane crash. Although you may hope that your friend has survived the crash, you are not at all hopeful that she did; the odds of her surviving are just too low. The fact, then, that a person hopes for an outcome therefore does not necessitate in her being additionally hopeful that the outcome will obtain. Hoping and being hopeful can come apart.
This distinction between hoping and being hopeful is not always drawn or fully appreciated in the literature on hope. The failure to distinguish these two senses of hope is most evident in many recent attempts to define hope. Most philosophers begin with the question of what it is for a person to hope, and then cite as an initial answer the ‘standard account’: To hope for an outcome is to desire the outcome and to believe that its obtainment is neither a certainty nor an impossibility. These theorists then proceed to criticize this account as false or inadequate because it fails to distinguish people who are hopeful from those who are not; despairing people, these theorists point out, also desire an outcome that they believe to be obtainable. To respond to this criticism, contemporary definitions of hope, including one of my earlier works (2019), therefore almost always append an additional condition to the standard account in order to capture what it is to be hopeful.
But if you find my above distinction between hoping and hopefulness plausible, you will see that these contemporary definitions of hope can be challenged. By not distinguishing the two senses of hope, these definitions err by building conditions of hopefulness into conditions of hoping. Doing so, however, implies that anytime a person ceases to be hopeful, she thereby ceases to hope. But this is, in my view, a mistake. As we saw above with the example of the plane crash, there are occasions in which people can, and need to, hope for outcomes about which they are not hopeful. There are also times in which people hope for outcomes without having given any thought whatsoever as to whether they are additionally hopeful that these outcomes will obtain. Hoping does not require hopefulness.
The article featured here, “The Phenomenology of Hope”, is part of my ongoing project to tease out the implications of this distinction between hoping and hopefulness. In the article, I try to reconcile a tension with respect to how philosophers have characterized hope’s phenomenology. A common view is that hope is generally positive and pleasant in its affective tone. This rosy depiction, however, has been challenged, most recently by Katie Stockdale who argued that some hopes, like those that are responses to threats, are such that they are entirely negatively valenced. How might we settle this dispute? In the article, I suggest that parties to this debate are talking past one another and that both are in some sense correct. To show this, I point out that the question “What is hope’s phenomenology?” is ambiguous due to hope’s having two distinct senses, and therefore needs to be parsed into two separate questions, namely, (1) What is the phenomenology of hoping? and (2) What is the phenomenology of hopefulness? Disambiguating the question, I argue, can shed light on the above dispute. On the one hand, since hoping does not require or is not always accompanied by hopefulness, some instances of hoping can be neutral or entirely negative in valence. In this respect, Stockdale is correct to identify some cases of hoping as completely constituted by fear. On the other hand, since hopefulness is a matter of having overall positive thoughts and feelings about the chances that a hoped-for outcome will obtain, being hopeful will always be positive in valence. Anyone who not only hopes for an outcome but is also additionally hopeful about its chances of obtaining will always occupy and enjoy a pleasant affective state. In this respect, the common view of hope’s being rosy receives support.
As we can see, the initial dispute about hope’s phenomenology is founded on an ambiguity over hope’s meaning. Although theorists use the same word ‘hope’, they in fact are referring to different phenomena. Thus, Stockdale has hoping in mind when she argues that hope can be fearful whereas those who adhere to the common view have hopefulness in mind when they claim that hope is always rosy. But once we clarify that hope has two distinct senses and clearly distinguish them, we see that the dispute dissolves. My contention is that some of the other disputes in the hope literature are founded on a similar ambiguity, and my current projects have been concerned with identifying, diagnosing and resolving them.
Bibliography
Kwong, J (2019) "What is Hope?" (2019) European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 243-254.
Kwong, J (2020) "Hope and Hopefulness" (2020) Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 50, no. 7, pp. 832 - 843.
Kwong, J (2022) "How to Theorize about Hope" European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 1426-1439.
If hoping/hopeful/hope are/is a reflective outcome of a embodiment composing their world, us humans, then hoping and hopeful are distinctions of intention and notice. As such they would be auxiliary emotions of the worldbuilding/moral urge, for which my words are inexact. The ambiguity glossed over by philosophers is then perhaps not heinous. The distinction is however welcomed, and cheered because once split it can be slashed back together hoping/hopeful/hope in a further distinction of use, indeed, why not a distinguished hope.