On Hope
Elrond: I give hope to men.
Aragorn: I keep none for myself.
From, of course, the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. And utter, total twaddle. Simple as that.
If you are still alive and not at this very moment in the act of committing suicide, you are either happy or have hope. Happiness we can disregard at this stage; its not what I'm looking at. Hope is. And "hope", so the saying goes, "srpings eternal"; and so does life. One without the other is impossible; hope, obviously, because it is a human concept, not an externally existing thing, and life because a life without hope is life without purpose or the prospect for improvement and its that latter that's important. If there is no prospect for improvement and one is unhappy, one will commit suicide; its the only possible avoidance of an unacceptable status quo or worse a deterioration. Even fear of death is effectively a hope that life will improve and that life is better than the alternatives; such a fear is, while seemingly not hope, itself hope. Hope is inescapable and the only thing really keeping us alive, in the absence of happiness; where that hope comes from is another matter.
We must now move on to where hope stems from, where it "springs eternal" from. This is different in specifics for different people; but generally there are three general reasons. First is divinity; faith in the divine of some sort. This divinity may be expected to eventually ensure that the world evens out, or even that their followers are favoured; or just that there is a better life after death if we survive through this life. All these are hopes stemming from "obligations" (if I may so phrase it) upon a deity; mankind's gods, from whereever they come (something for another musing perhaps), all have this in common. This all gets into theology, so I'll leave it here for now.
Next we have the hope that life evens out in the end by some sort of non-divine natural law; that overall it all evens out and we get as much good as bad. This is predicated upon a feeling or hope that the universe is in equilibrium in all things; including in terms of an individual human life and its trials and joys. This view, while theoretically logical (everything does seem to even out overall, does it not?) is illogical when analysed properly; the universe overall evens out, not for individual humans or even for the human race as a whole, but in terms only of physical laws, irrelevant (to our knowledge) to human actions, even if we take the most deterministic view possible; man's life will not pan out evenly, it will simply happen, disjointed events independant of each other but affecting each other. To simplify somewhat, this form of hope has no rational basis behind it.
The final form of hope is pure optimism; totally irrational and self-acknowledgedly so, it simply says that the world will improve with no basis behind the assertion. Utterly irrational and therefore neither defensible nor criticisable, except as a survival mechanism.
To summarise; hope is a survival mechanism, and without hope we should and would logically commit suicide when unhappy. It stems (this adds, by the by) from the concious or subconcious mind; in the former case, from the reasons above, and in the latter when rationalised it is rationalised as above. As those are irrational reasons (divinity I'll deal with as irrational over the weekend), we may as well abandon hope and therefore, it follows pretty simply, abandon life.
However this is not to say we should actually abandon it; philosophically, yes, it should be dropped as irrational, but in practical and everyday life, why bother with the philosophical problems with it? Even the ultimate rationalists and empiricists, saying they had no way to know the physical world, admitted that they had no choice but to believe in them in the course of their everyday lives; its the separation of a philosophical doubt or matter and a normal doubt or matter. So I'm hardly saying "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here"; rather, "Doubt hope, all ye who think".
All my own thoughts, so please, I beg you, tear into them as much as you please.
And to finish; let's put it all in the form of a Nietszchesque aphorism: "I, who have no hope, have nothing; I, without hope, am nothing"
Aragorn: I keep none for myself.
From, of course, the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. And utter, total twaddle. Simple as that.
If you are still alive and not at this very moment in the act of committing suicide, you are either happy or have hope. Happiness we can disregard at this stage; its not what I'm looking at. Hope is. And "hope", so the saying goes, "srpings eternal"; and so does life. One without the other is impossible; hope, obviously, because it is a human concept, not an externally existing thing, and life because a life without hope is life without purpose or the prospect for improvement and its that latter that's important. If there is no prospect for improvement and one is unhappy, one will commit suicide; its the only possible avoidance of an unacceptable status quo or worse a deterioration. Even fear of death is effectively a hope that life will improve and that life is better than the alternatives; such a fear is, while seemingly not hope, itself hope. Hope is inescapable and the only thing really keeping us alive, in the absence of happiness; where that hope comes from is another matter.
We must now move on to where hope stems from, where it "springs eternal" from. This is different in specifics for different people; but generally there are three general reasons. First is divinity; faith in the divine of some sort. This divinity may be expected to eventually ensure that the world evens out, or even that their followers are favoured; or just that there is a better life after death if we survive through this life. All these are hopes stemming from "obligations" (if I may so phrase it) upon a deity; mankind's gods, from whereever they come (something for another musing perhaps), all have this in common. This all gets into theology, so I'll leave it here for now.
Next we have the hope that life evens out in the end by some sort of non-divine natural law; that overall it all evens out and we get as much good as bad. This is predicated upon a feeling or hope that the universe is in equilibrium in all things; including in terms of an individual human life and its trials and joys. This view, while theoretically logical (everything does seem to even out overall, does it not?) is illogical when analysed properly; the universe overall evens out, not for individual humans or even for the human race as a whole, but in terms only of physical laws, irrelevant (to our knowledge) to human actions, even if we take the most deterministic view possible; man's life will not pan out evenly, it will simply happen, disjointed events independant of each other but affecting each other. To simplify somewhat, this form of hope has no rational basis behind it.
The final form of hope is pure optimism; totally irrational and self-acknowledgedly so, it simply says that the world will improve with no basis behind the assertion. Utterly irrational and therefore neither defensible nor criticisable, except as a survival mechanism.
To summarise; hope is a survival mechanism, and without hope we should and would logically commit suicide when unhappy. It stems (this adds, by the by) from the concious or subconcious mind; in the former case, from the reasons above, and in the latter when rationalised it is rationalised as above. As those are irrational reasons (divinity I'll deal with as irrational over the weekend), we may as well abandon hope and therefore, it follows pretty simply, abandon life.
However this is not to say we should actually abandon it; philosophically, yes, it should be dropped as irrational, but in practical and everyday life, why bother with the philosophical problems with it? Even the ultimate rationalists and empiricists, saying they had no way to know the physical world, admitted that they had no choice but to believe in them in the course of their everyday lives; its the separation of a philosophical doubt or matter and a normal doubt or matter. So I'm hardly saying "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here"; rather, "Doubt hope, all ye who think".
All my own thoughts, so please, I beg you, tear into them as much as you please.
And to finish; let's put it all in the form of a Nietszchesque aphorism: "I, who have no hope, have nothing; I, without hope, am nothing"