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The Virtue of Hope
| Article
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12099 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
8,007 Words |
| Author
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Russell Hittinger
Russell Hittinger is assistant professor of philosophy at
Fordham University. |
The late Hannah Arendt once mentioned that the most significant distinction between our time and preceding centuries is the "loss of belief in future states," by which she meant transcendent states, or the belief in heaven and hell. The anticipation of such future states, she observed, "is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority." Characteristically, the populations of modern regimes are stimulated by more palpable, this-worldly ambitions, particularly those of a material nature. It is perhaps paradoxical that one could also state, without exaggeration, that hope is the principal passion of modern life.
In the modern era, nearly every society has undergone one or more revolutions. And although the bearing of hope upon social psychology cannot be precisely quantified, one can scarcely understand modern politics without understanding the enormous political, economic, and spiritual investment in hope. For example, the worldwide debate concerning the relative merit of socialist and free market political economies is, to a considerable extent, a debate over how the objects of hope are explained and legitimated. Any effort to abstract these ideologies from their hope-content is doomed to being an irrelevant academic exercise. Those who control the reasons, and in some cases, the mere appearances, of hope control everything else. Great statesmen, religious leaders, and of course charlatans--al vie with one another to establish and to authorize our objects of hope. One of the things that needs to be clarified at the outset is that hope is certainly a passion, and not necessarily a virtue. The failure to appreciate the difference between hope as a passion and hope as a virtue is fraught with danger. This difference, as well as the failure to recognize it, may explain why this powerful and basic human feeling is so readily manipulated by ideologies.
HOPE IS NOT NECESSARILY VIRTUOUS
It is interesting that while nothing would seem to be more natural and desirable to the human heart than hope, neither the ancient nor medieval moralists included it among the so-called cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and courage. Nor is it found in any other table of natural virtues. Christian ethicists, of course, spoke of hope as a virtue, but only in a restricted theological sense. We will return to the theological notion of hope later. Here, we can ask why they failed to include hope among the ordinary moral virtues. Were the ancient and medieval thinkers blind to human psychology, or did they see something about hope that we tend to
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