Abstract
With the topic of hope’s desiring, we begin reflection on hope’s subjective side. Such reflection takes aimed hope to be a kind of doing, a kind of act, or perhaps also a kind of attitude. The subjective side of hope includes its conative aspect, its cognitional aspect, and its affective aspect. This last includes hope as feeling or emotion; the cognitional side, in this introductory analysis, includes hoping’s imagining and believing. Its conative side is the focus of this section, devoted to how hoping includes desiring and, with desiring, different ways of satisfying such desires. There are many words that can express what hope’s desiring is doing. A partial lexicon would include wishing, dreaming, wanting, willing, needing, and perhaps lacking; words like pressure, drive, impulse, and appetite (the scholastic appetitus) might also be included.1 In the present context, all the words mentioned will be taken as indicating some sort of stirring in some sort of direction.2
The hopes we develop are a measure of our maturity. Karl and Jeanetta Lyle Menninger Love Against Hate
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For this image I am indebted to Rosemary Haughton, The Mystery of Sexuality (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973), Chap. III, “The Layers of the Onion,” esp. pp. 33–37.
The first and third types of satisfaction are illustrated by Rollo May’s discussion of sex and eros, contrasted inasmuch as the former seeks release and the latter union with the beloved. There is also a contrast of movement “from behind”’ with movement “from ahead,” comparing Freud and Plato. See May’s Love and Will, pp. 87–88. And there are very helpful contributions to understanding satisfaction as union or being in Abraham Maslow’s exploration of peak experiences. See Toward a Psychology of Being, 2d ed., (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1968), Chaps. 6–7, 71–114.
Pace Ernst Bloch on “expectation-affect” [Erwartungsaffekt] and Aquinas as Kenny presents him.
Such an understanding of desiring is reflected in Ernst Bloch’s discussion of Buddha (Prinzip Hoffnung, Chap. 54) and in Schopenhauer and Zen.
Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2d ed., (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 35–58.
Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2d ed., (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 38.
Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2d ed., (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 53. Yet Maslow adds that habituation seems to support endurance of deprivation. Those who experienced relative starvation seem better able to endure lack of food. But perhaps deprivation or other frustration must be meaningful. Erik Erikson and Viktor Frankl both maintain that frustation can be borne if it is meaningful. Frankl is much drawn to Nietzsche’s saying, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. xiii;
Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2d ed. rev. and enl. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963), pp. 249–50.
Some writings of Erik H. Erikson helpful for this essay’s analysis are: Childhood and Society, 2d ed. rev. and enl. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., and Toronto: George J. McLeod, 1963),
Some writings of Erik H. Erikson helpful for this essay’s analysis are: Identity: Youth and Crisis, Austen Riggs Monograph No. 7 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., and Toronto: George J. McLeod, 1968);
Some writings of Erik H. Erikson helpful for this essay’s analysis are: Insight and Responsibility: Lectures on the Ethical Implications of Psychoanalytic Insight (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., and Toronto: George J. McLeod, 1964);
Some writings of Erik H. Erikson helpful for this essay’s analysis are: “Life Cycle,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan Co. & Free Press, 1968) 9: 286–92;
Some writings of Erik H. Erikson helpful for this essay’s analysis are: “The Roots of Virtue,” in The Humanist Frame, ed. Julian Huxley (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), pp. 225–46;
Some writings of Erik H. Erikson helpful for this essay’s analysis are: Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, Austen Riggs Monograph No. 4 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1958).
Erikson, Childhood, p. 274.
Erikson’s notion of basic trust, its bipolar context, and its bearing on this essay’s notion of hope-in, are set forth in chapter 7.
To my knowledge Erikson has given detailed account only of the adolescent strength Fidelity, the favorable outcome of the conflict between identity and role diffusion; he traces back to childhood and infancy the precursors of identity. In parallel fashion, a detailed account of hope would trace the trust-mistrust crisis, dominant in infancy, through its modalities in later stages. Erikson has found, in the adolescent crisis of identity versus identity-confusion, the presence of the trust-vs.-mistrust crisis of infancy; he labels it “time perspective vs. time diffusion.” Psychological Issues I, 1 (1959), p. 120.
Ezra Stotland also brings together a lot of experimental data regarding hope. The Psychology of Hope: An Integration of Experimental Clinical, and Social Approaches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969).
Homo Viator, pp. 49, 36.
John Macmurray, Reason and Emotion (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), “Education of the Emotions,” pp. 67–77; and “Developing Emotions,” Saturday Review 41 (1958): 22ff.
See also Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977).
William Lynch (Images of Hope) is very good in analysing these areas, and in presenting the traps that seduce one into impossibility. On primary and secondary processes, see Lynch, pp. 181–83, and Charles Brenner, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 49ff.
Reason, high spirit, and appetite or desire. Republic, Book IV, 435–42. The Phaedrus (246f) presents the image of the charioteer with a team of winged steeds, one upward-winging, the other down.
Kant’s distinction between virtus phaenomenon and virtus noumenon, and the relation of both to Willkür, is summarized and traced by John R. Silber in his essay “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion,” contained in Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans, with Introduction and Notes by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1960), pp. xcv–xcvi. The distinction seems to be applicable to hope insofar as the latter involves willing.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Godfrey, J.J. (1987). Hoping, Desiring, and being Satisfied. 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_4
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