Update: I've fleshed out my ideas below the fold.
Sources
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
by Emily Dickinson
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Elements of Dickinson’s poem, the feathers, gale, storm,
bird, land and sea, bumped into Stan Rogers’s tale of the wreck of the Nightengale
in my mind and I wanted to let them bob together in juxtaposition for the span
of today’s sun. Now under stars, and with Grim’s helpful reading suggestion, I
have some of the words for ideas that have been rolling through my mind.
One version of hope can be dismissed as being moved by mere
wishful thinking. That’s not the kind of hope for these meditations, which
focus instead on a kind of hope Aristotle described and later philosophers and
theologians expanded upon.
According to Claudia Bloeser’s SEC article “Hope,” Aristotle
said:
The coward, then, is a despairing
sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has
the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.
(Nicomachean Ethics 3.7, 1116a2)
She explains that “even though not every hopeful person is
courageous, every courageous person is hopeful. Hopefulness creates confidence,
which, if derived from the right sources, can lead to the virtue of courage.”
In the storm, the collier Nightengale is stove in on the
North Rock shoal and the crew cries out, "Oh, Captain, are we all for
drowning?" Have we no hope?
The captain roars back, "Oh, are ye brave and hardy
collier-men or are ye blind and cannot see?" There is still the captain’s
gig, with one place too few for all of them, and the captain orders his crew to
safety while he remains and dies. As Aristotle suggests, the captain’s hope for his men brings courage.
Here, I think, the captain becomes Dickinson’s “little Bird,” one with the Nightengale, asking not a crumb and giving his all.
9 comments:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hope/
Is that a suggestion that I read up a bit and flesh my thoughts out? :-D
Well, a very helpful suggestion indeed! I've had these ideas rolling around and couldn't work out the words for them, but the article made quick sense of it. Thank you!
I'm glad it worked out well for you. As the article points out, relatively few philosophers have taken hope seriously. I only wanted to point you in the direction of those who had.
For what it is worth, my take comes from Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Which I take to mean that hope comes from believing there is more to reality than what we perceive. That whole concept of unperceivable reality sort of kicks David Hume around like a deflated soccer ball. Mark78
Interesting, Mark78. There are several common conceptions of hope out there, and certainly the Christian view of it is important.
One of the criticisms Bloeser notes some philosophers have about hope is that it is not, they say, useful in epistemology and may even lead one astray. If you hope for something, they argue, then you have a motivation to believe it against evidence and reason.
What do you think?
I've been thinking about this, how hope and courage are related. Wouldn't hope actually be important for the development of all the virtues?
Why would one work to develop virtue unless one had hope of actually improving?
Greetings Tom. Against evidence and reason. That is an excellent demarcation. Evidence being what is perceivable and reason being what digests and reassembles perception to be consistent with prior understanding. Prone to error? Absolutely!
I suppose it depends on if true reality can be determined by evidence alone, or if true reality requires a logic that includes the possibility that effect implies cause, even if the cause is unknowable.
Two beer, three shot speculation on a timeline with a vector towards an unpleasant near future. Mark78
I don't think that hope is 'against the evidence of reason' necessarily. Your example is a good one for proving otherwise. Why should I engage in the practices that reliably produce virtue if I lack hope of improvement? Well, why should I lack hope of improvement? Two thousand years of practical examples follow from Aristotle's suggestion that practicing the virtues is how you habituate and integrate them. You can go to any gymansium and observe the progress made through reliable practice. Hope is perfectly rational in that case. All the evidence and experience supports it, as does the reasoned arguments of Aristotelian philosophy.
You can hope for things against evidence or experience, but it is far from necessary that hope abandon reason or evidence.
That makes sense. I wonder then if some reasonable hope isn't a natural aspect of achieving any kind of excellence.
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