Abstract
This paper addresses the phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish two broad kinds of predicament that are easily confused: ‘loss of hopes’ and ‘loss of hope’. I argue that not all hope can be characterised as an intentional state of the form ‘I hope that p’. It is possible to lose all hopes of that kind and yet retain another kind of hope. The hope that remains is not an intentional state or a non-intentional bodily feeling. Rather, it is a ‘pre-intentional’ orientation or ‘existential feeling’, by which I mean something in the context of which certain kinds of intentional state, including intentional hope, are intelligible. I go on to discuss severe depression, lack of aspiration, demoralisation and loss of trust in the world, in order to distinguish some qualitatively different forms that loss of hope can take.
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Notes
See, for example, Bovens (1999) and Pettit (2004) for other approaches that characterise hope as a kind of intentional state. These authors also address whether, when and why it is rational to hope, as does McGeer (2004). That question is not considered here. However, my discussion does at least complicate it, as different answers will be required for different kinds of hope and hopelessness. Of course, discussion of hope is not restricted to broadly ‘analytic’ philosophy. See Webb (2007) for a more wide-ranging survey of contemporary and historical work on hope in philosophy and elsewhere. As Webb makes clear, hope is not always construed as an intentional state.
My emphasis throughout is upon loss of hope and experience of that loss. However, it is important to keep in mind that the various kinds of experience that we refer to as ‘hopelessness’ or ‘despair’ may have additional aspects. When one actively despairs over something, there is arguably more to this than just loss or awareness of loss.
See, for example, Solomon (2004) for a representative selection of recent approaches to emotion, where this assumption is very much in evidence throughout.
This kind of meaning loss does not exhaust the experience of grief. My claim is just that it can be an aspect of grief.
An alternative approach is to construe radical hope as ‘meta-hope’, the intentional state of hoping for the return of hope. However, as my discussion of depression will show, loss of radical hope can amount to a sense that intentional hope (including the hope that hope will return) is impossible. ‘Loss of meta-hope’ might account for a total absence of hopes but it does not account for this sense of impossibility.
Pre-intentional hope is thus akin to faith in some respects, but they also differ. Faith can have a determinate content, whereas radical hope survives the loss of all such contents. Also, faith can involve unwavering certainty whereas radical hope is a sense of there being certain kinds of possibility.
McGeer (2004) describes what I think is the same thing. Rather than assuming that hope is a kind of intentional state, she construes it as a drive towards the future that is integral to human life and inseparable from the capacity for action. See also Webb (2007, p. 68) for a distinction between intentional hope and “open-ended hope”, where the latter takes the form of a general “orientation toward the future”. Webb distinguishes three principal kinds of intentional hope and two kinds of open-ended hope.
I do not include ‘pessimism’, which I take to involve a disposition to form fewer intentional hopes, rather than a loss or privation of something presupposed by the intelligibility of intentional hope. Even so, my list is not intended to be exhaustive, and I do not want to rule out the possibility that there are other ways of losing hope, which differ from anything described here.
I do not wish to suggest that all cases of diagnosed severe depression involve loss of ‘hope’ in this sense. My position is that many of them do, as exemplified by first-person accounts.
One might object that the severely depressed person can still hope for death, and that some kind of desperate hope therefore persists. This is sometimes so. However, many authors explicitly report having had a sense that nothing could bring relief, that the predicament was eternal, inescapable.
This need not involve ‘losing’ hope; perhaps some people never had it in the first place.
See Parker (2004) for a critique of the attempt to medicalise demoralisation.
A less extreme form of ‘demoralisation’ may occur in some people who are faced with terminal illness or other circumstances: not all hope in one's future is lost, but one does cease to experience and think about the world in terms of longer term possibilities. To a greater degree, one ‘lives in the present’. This is structurally similar to a loss of aspiring hope but is not the same—one could retain shorter term aspirations and distinguish these from more trivial pursuits. Giving up on certain possibilities or kinds of possibility need not be experienced as a bad thing. Indeed, it might involve a sense of relief and an increase in happiness. Thanks to Havi Carel for these points.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was written as part of the project ‘Emotional Experience in Depression: A Philosophical Study’. I would like to thank the AHRC and DFG for funding the project, and my project colleagues in the UK and Germany for many helpful discussions. I am also grateful to Peter Goldie, George Graham, my colleagues in the Durham University Philosophy Department, an audience at the University of Hull and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.
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Ratcliffe, M. What is it to lose hope?. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 597–614 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9215-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9215-1