Abstract
What sense can be made of hope as a feeling or emotion? Is hope a mood, an affect, a passion of the soul, a psychological state? Is it a generic disposition or attitude? Is it a state of mind, or a “climate of the mind”? These questions overlap where the subjective side of hope appears to be as much affective as conative or cognitional.
I cannot resist a feeling of hope. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
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Note
J.P. Day, in “Hope,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1969): 89–102, employs these three observable elements as criteria.
Broader bases are outlined by William P. Alston in “Emotion and Feeling” Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillian & Free Press, 1967) 2: 479–486.
Thus concludes J.P. Day, while recognizing nonetheless that most philosophers, including Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Hume take hope to be an emotion.
Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 476.
There is a difference between holding that all emotions are specified by objects and holding that emotions are generally specified by objects. Anthony Kenny, in Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and New York: Humanities Press, 1963) holds the stronger position (pp. 60–62, 73);
putatively objectless emotions have latent objects, or are derivative. Kenny’s formulation, and his argument that connections between emotion and object are essential or non-contingent, have been challenged by J.R.S. Wilson in his Emotion and Object (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), Chs. IV and V. That emotions generally have or should have objects that specify them is held by J.P. Day in “Hope” and, in a different context, by Rollo May in Love and Will (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), p. 91. George A. Schrader, in his “The Structure of Emotion,” takes a position close to Kenny’s but from a phenomenological standpoint. His essay appears in Invitation to Phenomenology, ed. James M. Edie (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965), pp. 252–265.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 40, a. 2.
Freud, Collected Works 18: 12; Heidegger, Being and Time, Section 40.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), p. 116.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Godfrey, J.J. (1987). Hope as Feeling. In: Godfrey, J.J. (eds) A Philosophy of Human Hope. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3499-3_7
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