The Phenomenology of Despair

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the experience of hope by focusing on experiences that seem to rival hope, namely, disappointment, desperation, panic, hopelessness, and despair. I explore these issues phenomenologically by examining five kinds of experiences that counter hope (or in some instances, seem to do so): first, by noting the cases in which hope simply is not operative, then by treating the significance of both desperation and pessimism, next by examining the experience of hopelessness, and finally, by treating the experience of despair. Here despair is shown to constitute the most profound challenge to hope among these experiences and to be foundational for the others, even though it is disclosed ultimately as founded in hope.

Keywords:

• phenomenology
• hope
• despair
• pessimism
• hopelessness
• panic

Notes

1 See Anthony J. Steinbock, ‘Time, Otherness, and Possibility in the Experience of Hope’, in Pol Vandevelde (ed.) Issues in Interpretation Theory (Milwaukee, MI: Marquette University Press, 2006), pp. 271–89. On the theme of the phenomenology of hope, see also Klaus Held, ‘Idee einer Phänomenologie der Hoffnung’, in D. Lohmar and D. Fonfara (eds) Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Phänomenologie (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 126–41.

2 Though he is cited by Diogenes Laertius as regarding hope as nothing but a waking dream (Lives of Eminent Philosophers).

3 Also, hope is a theological virtue because the attainment of this object lies beyond the capacity of the subject. Since it transcends human effort, this object can only be received as a gift, through dependence on the help of another (the formal object of efficient cause: see Summa, Theologiae II–II, 17, 4, De Spe, 1). Moreover, this very act of hope, qua virtue, is essentially a gift.

4 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.9. Hume agrees with Aquinas insofar as hope is a passion. But for Aquinas, the opposite of hope is despair; for Hume, Spinoza, and Bloch, it is fear.

5 ‘Hence he [Zeus] gives hope to humanity: it is in truth the worst of evils because it lengthens their agony’, Human, All Too Human, text 71. ‘Those who suffer must be sustained by a hope that can never be contradicted by any reality or be disposed by any fulfillment – a hope for the beyond. (Precisely because of its ability to keep the unfortunate in continual suspense, the Greeks considered hope the evil of evils, the truly insidious evil: it remained behind in the barrel of evils.)’

6 In Dante’s ‘Paradise’, for example, there is no hope (no longer hope) because hope is fulfilled. (To hope for anything beyond what is given in paradise would be a sign of pride and mitigate the attitude of humility and acceptance peculiar to paradise.)

7 Note also in this regard that whereas I can have a mistaken perception, I cannot have a mistaken hope. Since hope is a modalization of the very belief structure that we find in perception, it has the ability to arise in the face of a ‘contradiction’ of fact or even a perceived ‘impossibility’. To hope that it will rain on a sunny summer afternoon is neither correct nor incorrect, neither true nor false.

8 Thus, the protagonist in Bresson’s A Man Escaped is indeed faced with a situation that appears hopeless, and by all calculations of most all the other prisoners, it is. But if the protagonist were to experience it only as impossible, he would not try to escape; he would give up.

9 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 35, 91.

10 This expressive, purposive activity, as witnessed in the undampered persistence of the boy through the creation of the gigantic bell, signals or ‘rings’ to him the significance of creation in spite of all else. It strikes him on the level of his despair and calls him to himself and out of despair.