hope
29 Sep 2025 - 29 Sep 2025
there is hope, an infinity of hope – but not for us.
- – Kafka
- Hope (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (via WS Discord)
An ambivalent evaluation of hope is also reflected in Hesiod’s version of the tale of Pandora. When all the evils had escaped from Pandora’s jar, famously, only hope (elpis) remained (“Works and Days”, §90). This seems to suggest that hope can also sustain human agency in the face of widespread evil.
- Huh didn't even realize this was a Thing in philosophy. Reminds me of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, kind of has traces of the flavor.
- Stewart Brand was my beacon of hopefulness.
Camus follows Nietzsche in declaring (religious) hope the worst of all evils (Judaken and Bernasconi 2012: 264). His critique of hope is linked to the idea that the human existence is absurd. The “elusive feeling of absurdity” (Camus 1955: 12) is characterized by a discrepancy: The human mind asks fundamental questions about the meaning of life, but the world does not provide answers. Camus’ understanding of the absurd is best captured in the image of Sisyphus, who exemplifies life’s absurdity in his “futile and hopeless labor”
- OTOH
Camus allows for a positive view of hope—a kind of “étrange espoir” [strange hope] that is directed towards the possibilities inherent in the present (Schlette 1995: 134) and that is characterized by humanism and solidarity with all human beings (Bidmon 2016: 233).
Even though hope rarely features explicitly in pragmatist writings, it has been suggested that pragmatist accounts of hope can be found in the works of William James and John Dewey...the issue of hope is “implicit in most pragmatic philosophies”, as it is related to central pragmatist topics, such as meliorism and faith, and particular hopes for social progress
