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160 5 Hope and Despair We saw how repentance can appropriate the past and present significance of an event and myself through a reprise toward an open future; and we saw how it can liberate me through a dispositing and existential disclaiming so that I can reorient myself through an immanent and transcendent revolution, reestablishing interpersonal connections. I treat hope under the rubric of a moral emotion of possibility not only because of its futural openness—this is shared by many experiences—but because of the modality of a sustainable future that it actualizes by being in relation to an other-than-myself. Because I am dependent upon this other who or that sustains my hope, hope can never in the final analysis be a matter of pride. I regard despair as the most profound counter to the moral emotion to hope because in this experience, the other that sustains hope is paradoxically given as not given such that this sustainability is experienced as radically shut down. As Albert Camus has shown, without the experience of some absolute, some ground, some transcendence , some other, both hope and despair are meaningless; or better, we are left neither with the moral, nor the religious, nor even the quasiexistentialism of a Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Sartre, but rather with absurdity .1 Hope and despair by virtue of their shared structure are emotions that are enacted in the sphere of the person, and resonate morally and religiously. Rather than presuppose the work done by acclaimed philosophers and theologians on hope and despair, such as Søren Kierkegaard,2 Ernst Bloch,3 Gabriel Marcel,4 Paul Ricoeur,5 Martin Heidegger,6 or Jürgen Moltmann,7 to name just a few, I continue with a phenomenological style of description of these experiences. To discern its structure, I draw on mundane examples by design. I do this because hope, which emerges in the face of the impossible, can contravene even the everyday situations in ways that we often take for granted, and not only those that are issues of life and death. Hope at its root is of course radically personal, radically “existential,” whereas the existential bearing of despair, by its very nature, is more immediately evident and therefore is more demanding of such “life and death” examples. After appealing to the futural dimension of hope as inherently distinct from an expectation (1), I turn to the unique possibility-structure 161 H O P E A N D D E S P A I R of hope, initially discerning its modality of possibility as engagement (2). Observing that, in hope, something is experienced as beyond my control such that I am dependent upon what is other than myself, some otherness, without intending it as such (3), another possibility structure comes to the fore, namely, sustainability (4). These structures suggest that the experience of hope is essentially distinct from other experiences such as probability, wishing, longing, desiring, and importantly, denial (5). Further qualifying the temporal meaning of hope, as an awaiting-enduring (6), I take up potential counter-experiences that also relate to the modality of possibility. I describe despair as the experience of the ground of hope as impossible, such that it is given as impossible. I distinguish despair from other experiences that seem to rival hope like disappointment, pessimism, desperation, panic, and hopelessness (7). Hope’s Temporal Orientation as Futural When we examine the temporality of hoping we notice that one temporal dimension stands out as essential, namely, the future. When I hope, I am oriented toward a futural open significance, most often (but not exhaustively) expressed in terms of some futural occurrence. Let me be more precise by beginning with some very simple examples. Let’s say it is in the middle of winter and I hope that it will become sunny and warm outside; I hope to go cycling. The futural dimension is evident in such acts of hope. Notice that I cannot hope that it was warm or that I went cycling; similarly, I cannot hope that it is sunny now and that I am cycling now, when I experience it as actually sunny and warm and me actually cycling. The actuality of the event in the present or the past will either be the fulfillment or disappointment of hope, but it will not constitute the temporal orientation of the hope-act. A discussion of the structure of fulfillment and disappointment where hope is concerned would take us too far beyond the limits...

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