Session 3: Phenomenology of Hope

Session 3: Phenomenology of Hope
Chair: Fontini Vaki

Chancing Upon the Sleeve of Another: The Existential Meaning Of Hoping Itself
Claire Potter
Médecine Scientifique, Psychopathologie et Psychanalyse, Denis Diderot Paris VII, Paris, France

While an existential understanding of hope might sustain itself with the notion that subjective experience breaches an incomprehensible and rationalist universe, I would like to broaden this idea with the suggestion that within the incomprehensible universe, hope – a phenomenon only seemingly founded upon the future – must be analysed, as Heidegger calls for it to be, in much the same way much as fear, such that hope is not what breaches the indifferent universe in which we live, but rather it permits us to live affectively within that very universe. In this way, I would like to argue that hope, like its inverse fear or despair, can be read not only in the symbolic terms of its futural capacity – as akin to faith – but rather as itself having a past and a history for hope stems from experience grounded in what Heidegger describes as already having been.
Therein to hope brings the subject up against himself, up against repeated and already lived experience, so that the act of hoping thwarts the possibility of reaching a conclusive rationalistic base and puts into question not only my possible future but more importantly the apprehension of my possible past.
Of particular interest to this paper is how modalities of hope might permit and indeed question my encounter with an other who, through my hoping rather than my knowing, evades as well as participates in the materiality of my (primordial) fiction(s). It therein becomes the imagined sleeve of the other – that upon which I pin or project my hope – that gives ground to a hoping that undoes ideological mystification such that meaning is not found or conferred upon the other, but rather our possible encounter is supposed without knowledge how to go beyond the encounter itself.
In order to examines the rapport between hope as a futural phenomenon – that is hoping for something for oneself – and hope as a retrospectively inclined experience whereby the act of hoping confronts the subject with what is hoped for, I will examine the myth of Pandora’s box in Ovid’s Metamorphoses wherein after the evils of the world have escaped from Pandora’s box, it is hope that solely remains, such that hoping – that which draws me to and permits the chance of a non-predetermined encounter with an other – licences the re-writing of what is otherwise held to be an un-rewritable history. I conclude with the notion that hope, following St. Augustine, is what remains “unseen”; it is for that reason that it remains in Pandora’s box: to pictoralise it in terms of a positivist project would be to render it no longer hope.

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Is there Hope at Twilight?
Çagdas Ceyhan & Erhan Akarçay
Department of Journalism, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey and Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey

The idea of history as a non-stop progress had emerged in passing of 17 th to 18 th century. According to this point of view time is a consequence of specific triple structure that is formed of past, present and future. The structure of modern time had conceived history as a movement through uncertainty to certainty. Hope that the future can be formed had composed of the essence of the conception of progressive history
We are in times of history that progress is both seen as a formation of future and an accumulative catastrophe. Just as in Benjamin’s metaphor ‘the angel of history’, the fact that we call ‘progress’ is conceived as ‘a unique catastrophe which drifts salvage on top of another salvage and razes what it meets’ that the angel of history sees. It seems that the linear conception of time had been stabilized at an infinite present between the catastrophe of past and future. The man of modern times is fearful and worried at twilight in between of the loss of his past and his belief in the loss of future.
In this short study we will claim that we live in the age of uncertainty and this uncertainty is not something given and it is hidden in the transformation of capitalism. We will try to demonstrate how uncertainty and pessimistic view of future changes our conception of time. Finally we will say that the future can only exist by the utopia of future.

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A Developmental Look at Hoping: Hope as Attachment Process
Stephen Neff

This paper will introduce the idea of hope as a relational process.  The avenue to be explored is the research performed on future orientation and social processes in adolescents.  I use the literature as a jumping off point, talking about how the socialization process influences the development of future-orientation.  As future-orientation is a (the?) key aspect to hope, I will then begin discussing hope in terms of positive future-orientation even in the midst of the exigencies of life.  From this perspective I would begin building my thoughts about hope’s relational engendering from parents/early environment while emphasizing that hope continues to develop/change with present emotionally significant relationships.  Hoping, however, isn’t as simple as feeling good about those we have around us—this is avoidance actually.  At this point, I would introduce my concept of hope: As one’s orientation to the future can be seen to change by virtue of an individual’s emotional attachment to others, the future itself can be construed as an emotional composite of previous and current relationships (and prospects for new relationships?) projected out in front of each of us temporally to fill the void of unknowing with regards to the next moment.  Hope, then, is the intersubjectively-grounded positive relationship of the individual to this relationally engendered projection of ‘future’.  Hope is always in process as the intersubjective grounding is constantly changing with the relationships with which we are currently engaged.  Thus, when we are experiencing hope through some general idea that though the current situation is dire all things will work for the good, we are experiencing the positive value of future that we’ve imbued from our projected emotional composite.  To contrast this phenomenon, I might look at the data from morbidity and mortality studies of abused children; the data provides a clear view that children who are abused show much less positive future orientation, never learn to care for themselves and often end up committing suicide.  The point here is that a negative association with the future often obtains among adolescents who have a history of being treated poorly.