Théodore Géricault, “Raft of the Medusa”
My faulty faculty book group talked about hope recently. Specifically, we discussed analytic philosopher Adrienne Martin’s book How We Hope: A Moral Psychology. The two English Department member of the group brought poems about hope to supplement the discussion.
Analytic philosophy is not my thing so I can’t do justice to Martin’s attempt to explain how hope works, but here’s an attempt. Martin spent two years in a cancer ward as a bioethicist observing the operations of hope in terminally ill patients who were receiving experimental drug treatments. Martin says that, because it was so clear that the patients were going to die, the doctors did not have to worry about purveying false hopes to their patients. Instead, the focus was on whether patients could use hope in beneficial ways.
Martin lists a number of the questions about hope that emerged from her study:
Is it really the last and best bulwark against crushing despair? If so, how does it work, and how is it lost? What does it mean to say hope is “false”? Is supporting hope ever literally deceptive? What are the best forms of hope? How does hope influence deliberation and decision-making?
And one other question from another situation:
How could hope seem to one person an unrealistic vagary and to another a solid anchor in a storm?
In seeking to address such questions, Martin takes as her base point of departure analytic philosophy’s “orthodox” definition of hope. This contends that hope is “a combination of the desire for an outcome and the belief that the outcome is possible but not certain.” Finding this definition to be inadequate, especially when dealing with the phenomenon of “hoping against hope,” Martin looks back at various philosophical debates. These include such figures as Aquinas, Hume, and Kant as well as more recent philosophers.
In the end, she arrives at a description of hope that includes one’s predisposition, one’s rational calculations, and one’s pragmatic concerns. If I understand her right, this is like saying one may have a hopeful or a despairing predisposition, one looks at a situation to figure out the odds, and one assesses the practical benefits of hoping. Even if the odds are terrible, there might still be worthwhile reasons to hope. Martin quotes philosopher Ariel Meirav, who turns to a Stephen King story-turned-movie, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” to show how these different element might interact:
Andy lives in the hope of escape, whereas Red despairs of this. Indeed, Red thinks that hope should be resisted, suppressed, for hoping in this virtually hopeless situation would threaten his sanity…Red will say, “I grant you it is possible, but the chance is only one in a thousand!” whereas Andy will say, “I grant you the chance is only one in a thousand, but it is possible!”
Of course, when we read or watch the Stephen King story, we know that both King and Hollywood tilt the genre towards making the impossible possible. We seek out such genre fiction precisely because it affirms our hopes. Or we do so unless we are Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest:
Cecily: I hope [the three volume novel that you wrote] did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Miss Prism. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Cecily. I suppose so. But it seems very unfair.
Because our lives are not novels, better examples are those drawn from real life, such as from two of the patients that Martin observed:
Alan and Bess, the two phase 1 cancer research participants, strongly desire that the experimental drug will turn out to be a cure, and they agree that this outcome would be a “miracle”—the chances are less than one percent. Bess, however, has incorporated these attitudes, her desire and her probability assignment, into a justificatory rationale for hopeful feelings and activities. She stands ready to justify relying on a cure in making her future plans, though she also thinks she ought to have a back-up plan in place. She also thinks it is justifiable to spend a fair amount of time imagining scenarios related to a cure, such as good news on her next scan, or the return of health and energy. Moreover, she sees it as justifiable that, when she engages in these fantasies, she feels a positive feeling of anticipation—indeed, this is what we might call the feeling of hope, its occurrent affective presence.
In the original version of Cancer Research, I characterized Alan as hopeful but not as hopeful as Bess. He does not, I said, really hope against hope. Under the incorporation analysis, the difference is one of degree. Alan perhaps stands ready to justify some of these activities; he thinks it is reasonable to fantasize a bit about good outcomes and feel fairly positive about his fantasies. But he hesitates to go as far as Bess. That 1 percent chance, by his lights, permits a degree of hope, but it is still extremely low, and he is careful not to go too far and focus too much on the possibility of a cure.
I have to admit that philosophical analysis doesn’t come easily to me so it is with some relief I turn to poetry. One of literature’s most famous poems about hope, of course, is by Emily Dickinson:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Hearing hope’s tune in the gale is an example of hoping against hope. Indeed, Dickinson notes that the storm would have to be sore indeed for us to stop hoping. I suspect that, for her, even a 1% survival chance of survival is not that sore.
I’m also struck by how Dickinson, unlike our analytic philosopher, doesn’t spell out exactly what hope is or what it desires. It is a “thing” with feathers—not a bird—and it sings a wordless tune. Although, as Martin notes, calculation may enter in, hope is not only about calculation. It is more a warmth and a sweetness that never stops at all. It also defies calculation in never asking anything of us in return.
My colleague Jennifer Cognard-Black brought in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” which I’ll discuss tomorrow.
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