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http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9215-1
AUTHOR'S PROOF
Metadata of the article that will be visualized in OnlineFirst
1 Article Title What is it to lose hope?
2 Article Sub- T i tl e
3 Article Copyright -
Year
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
(This w ill be the copyright line in the final PDF)
4 Journal Name Phenomenology and the C ognitiv e Sciences
5
Correspondi ng
Author
Family Nam e Ratcliffe
6 Particl e
7 Given Nam e Matthew
8 Suffi x
9 Organi zation Durham University
10 Division Department of Phi l osophy
11 Address 50 Ol d El vet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK
12 e-mail M.J.Ratcliffe@durham .ac.uk
13
Schedul e
Recei ved
14 Revi sed
15 Accepted
16 Abstract This paper address es t he phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish
two broad kinds of predicament t hat are easily conf us ed: ‘los s of hopes’
and ‘loss of hope’. I argue that not all hope can be charac terised as an
intentional s tate of the f orm ‘I hope that p’. It is possible to lose all hopes
of that kind and y et retain another k ind of hope. The hope that remains is
not an int entional s tate or a non-intentional bodily f eeling. R ather, it is a
‘pre-intentional’ orient ation or ‘existential f eeling’, by which I m ean
something in the context of which certain kinds of intentional state,
including intent ional hope, are intelligible. I go on to discus s s ev ere
depression, lack of aspiration, demoralis ation and loss of trust in t he world,
in order to distinguis h some qualit ativ ely dif ferent f orms t hat los s of hope
can tak e.
17 Keywords
separated by ' - '
Demoralisat ion - D epression - Ex istent ial f eeling - Hopeles sness -
Pre-intentional em otion - Radical hope
18 Foot note
informati on
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1
2
3
4
What is it to lose hope?
5Matthew Ratcliffe
6
7
#Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
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9
Abstract This paper addresses the phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish
10two broad kinds of predicament that are easily confused: ‘loss of hopes’and ‘loss of
11hope’. I argue that not all hope can be characterised as an intentional state of the
12form ‘Ihopethatp’. It is possible to lose all hopes of that kind and yet retain another
13kind of hope. The hope that remains is not an intentional state or a non-intentional
14bodily feeling. Rather, it is a ‘pre-intentional’orientation or ‘existential feeling’,by
15which I mean something in the context of which certain kinds of intentional state,
16including intentional hope, are intelligible. I go on to discuss severe depression, lack
17of aspiration, demoralisation and loss of trust in the world, in order to distinguish some
18qualitatively different forms that loss of hope can take.
19Keywords Demoralisation .Depression .Existential feeling .Hopelessness .
20Pre-intentional emotion .Radical hope
21
22
Introduction
23My aim here is to cast some light on the nature of hope by exploring what it is to
24experience a loss of hope. What kinds of predicament are communicated by statements
25such as ‘I've lost hope’,‘there is no hope’,‘it’s hopeless’,‘I despair over this’or ‘I’min
26despair’? One approach is to see whether different kinds of experience are associated
27with different terms—perhaps an experience of ‘hopelessness’differs in some way
28from one of ‘despair’. However, I will suggest that this is not very informative, as terms
29like ‘despair’and ‘hopelessness’are used interchangeably to refer to a range of subtly
30different experiences. In what follows, I will describe and thus distinguish some of
31them.
Phenom Cogn Sci
DOI 10.1007/s11097-011-9215-1
M. Ratcliffe (*)
Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK
e-mail: M.J.Ratcliffe@durham.ac.uk
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32One way of characterising loss of hope is to first offer an account of what it is to
33hope and then treat loss of hope as the subtraction of a state or states of that kind.
34Hope, one might suggest, is an intentional state of the form ‘I hope that p’. The task
35of understanding hope would therefore require us to distinguish forms of hope from
36various other kinds of intentional state, such as belief, desire and expectation. A
37recent account along such lines is offered by Meirav (2009). He starts by considering
38the view that hope consists of a desire plus an assessment of probability. This, he
39observes, faces the problem that two people can have the same level of desire for p
40and assign much the same probability to p, while one of them hopes for pand the
41other does not. Hence, according to Meirav, hope also involves recognising that p
42depends upon factors outside of one’s control. However, this is still not enough, as
43despair similarly incorporates recognition that “something distinct from oneself”will
44settle the matter (Meirav 2009, p. 229). He thus adds that what distinguishes hope
45from lack of hope or even despair is trust in this external factor, a sense that it is not
46only somehow person-like but also ultimately good or on one’s side.
47Without endorsing the specifics of this or any other analysis, let us assume—for
48now—that something along these general lines is right, that hope is a distinctive kind
49of intentional state.
1
To complicate matters, it is possible to distinguish several
50subtypes of intentional hope. For example, Steinbock (2007, p. 439) mentions
51desperation and panic, where desperation involves trying to “force the issue”rather
52than waiting for it to resolve itself, whereas panic involves “freezing up”. There is a
53more general distinction to be drawn between passive hope, where one waits for
54something to happen, and more active forms of hope, which involve hoping that
55one’s actions will achieve some outcome. We can also distinguish enthusiastic
56anticipation, such as when a child unwraps a birthday present hoping to find
57something nice inside, from the kind of hope that accompanies dread, where one
58clings to the possibility that the dreaded event will not happen. However, regardless
59of the various nuances we might discern, all share the common structure ‘I hope (in
60some way and to some extent) that/for p’. Hence, it seems reasonable to assume that
61‘I’ve lost all hope of p’communicates the fact that one no longer has an intentional
62state of the general type hwith content p(propositional or otherwise). However, not
63all loss of hope is so content-specific. What about complaints such as ‘I have lost all
64hope’or ‘all I can feel is utter despair ’? We could simply extend the same account
65and maintain that such predicaments involve losing a greater number of hopes or
66perhaps even all hopes. Alternatively, rather than the sudden removal of one or more
67tokens of type h, losing hope could be conceived of in terms of fading, where the
68degree of hope in various possible outcomes gradually diminishes. Whichever the
69case, it also needs to be acknowledged that loss of hope is not merely the absence of
70something. People often complain of a painful awareness of loss. So we could
1
See, for example, Bovens (1999) and Pettit (2004) for other approaches that characterise hope as a kind
of intentional state. These authors also address whether, when and why it is rational to hope, as does
McGeer (2004). That question is not considered here. However, my discussion does at least complicate it,
as different answers will be required for different kinds of hope and hopelessness. Of course, discussion of
hope is not restricted to broadly ‘analytic’philosophy. See Webb (2007) for a more wide-ranging survey of
contemporary and historical work on hope in philosophy and elsewhere. As Webb makes clear, hope is not
always construed as an intentional state.
M. Ratcliffe
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71further add that intentional states of type hhave been replaced by other types of
72state, such as disappointment, sadness or regret.
2
73I am not sure whether anyone explicitly advocates this kind of account. However,
74something like it is implicit in at least some contexts of enquiry and practice.
75Consider, for instance, the ‘Beck hopelessness scale’, a device used in clinical
76psychology to quantify a person’s degree of hopelessness (Beck et al. 1974). The
77scale is premised on the view that hopelessness is not just an inchoate feeling, but
78something that is constituted—at least in part—by evaluative judgements. The data
79for calculating a person’s degree of hopelessness consist of yes/no responses to
80twenty propositions, most of which explicitly concern the future. They include, for
81example, “my future seems dark to me”and “I don’t expect to get what I really
82want”. Loss of hope thus seems to involve a switch of attitude with respect to
83various propositional contents. The scale does not make clear what it is that renders
84one instance of hopelessness more profound than another. Perhaps greater profundity
85involves loss of more hope contents or, alternatively, loss of hope contents that are
86more encompassing in scope and thus have a more significant effect upon one’s life.
87For example, loss of the hope that ‘my life will have some kind of purpose’would
88have a more significant effect than loss of the hope that ‘I will do something today
89that will have some kind of purpose’, as the former implies the latter but not vice
90versa. Another possibility is fading: a more profound loss of hope could involve a
91greater drop in the level of hope for various things. However, whichever account we
92adopt in a given instance, losing hope would seem to involve loss or diminishment
93of however many intentional states of a certain kind.
94Even if the Beck scale does not actually entail such a view, it is at least insensitive
95to the distinction between hopelessness as loss of intentional states and other kinds
96of hopelessness that I will describe here, which are quite different. Much of the
97recent philosophical literature on emotion is similarly insensitive. There is a
98tendency to assume that emotional experiences must consist of intentional states
99(such as ‘judgements’,‘appraisals’or ‘perceptions’), feelings, or a combination of
100intentional states and feelings.
3
Some have challenged the view that all feelings are
101either non-intentional states or intentional states that can only have one’s body or
102part of one’s body as their object. For instance, Goldie (e.g. 2000;2009) argues that
103many feelings are ‘feelings towards’states of affairs outside of the body. So emotions
104need not consist of intentional states plus non-intentional feelings (or intentional
105feelings directed exclusively at the body), as at least some of the relevant feelings are
106intrinsically world-directed. However, regardless of this and numerous other
107developments that further complicate discussion of the nature of emotion, a
108pervasive assumption remains intact: that the ingredients of emotions can fall into
109only two categories: intentional and non-intentional. I will challenge this
110assumption, by showing that it serves to obscure an important aspect of our
2
My emphasis throughout is upon loss of hope and experience of that loss. However, it is important to
keep in mind that the various kinds of experience that we refer to as ‘hopelessness’or ‘despair’may have
additional aspects. When one actively despairs over something, there is arguably more to this than just loss
or awareness of loss.
3
See, for example, Solomon (2004) for a representative selection of recent approaches to emotion, where
this assumption is very much in evidence throughout.
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111emotional phenomenology. Some emotions are neither intentional nor non-
112intentional. Rather, they are what I call ‘pre-intentional’: they comprise an
113experiential backdrop that determines which kinds of intentional state are intelligible
114possibilities for a person.
4
115I accept that some of the experiences we describe in terms of losing hope involve
116loss of intentional states of a particular kind. However, I will argue that there is also
117another kind of hope, which is not an attitude with some content, however vague or
118encompassing that content might be. Instead, it is a context in which states of the
119kind ‘I hope that p’are possible. It can—in principle—survive the loss of all
120intentional hopes: one can lose ‘all hopes’without losing ‘all hope’. Loss of this pre-
121intentional ‘hope’is not loss of a hope or of any number of hopes. It is loss of the
122possibility of adopting an attitude of the kind ‘I hope that p’. This is something that
123one can experience as a loss.
124It could be maintained that what I call ‘pre-intentional hope’is just a disposition
125towards experiences of hope and therefore has no phenomenology of its own.
126However, I reject that view. Pre-intentional hope is a form of what I elsewhere call
127‘existential feeling’(Ratcliffe 2005;2008;forthcoming). Existential feelings, I
128maintain, play a distinctive phenomenological role: they constitute a sense of finding
129oneself in the world, which determines the shape of all experience and thought. I
130adopt the term ‘existential feeling’partly because most such feelings do not fit into
131familiar emotion categories. Indeed, many do not even have names and are instead
132conveyed by combinations of metaphor, simile, analogy and/or reference to their
133causes (Ratcliffe 2008, Chapter 2; Ratcliffe forthcoming). However, some do fall
134under established emotion categories, such as ‘hope’and ‘guilt’, and I also refer to
135these existential feelings as ‘pre-intentional emotions’(Ratcliffe 2010b). Terminology
136aside though, why should we concede that pre-intentional hope (or its loss) is
137something we experience? The case for this will become clear as we proceed. In brief,
138certain experiential changes are, I will suggest, best interpreted in terms of changes in
139pre-intentional hope. This supports the view that there is a phenomenology of pre-
140intentional hope.
141One might also wonder what a pre-intentional emotion or existential feeling
142actually consists of. References to its being ‘pre-intentional’, or to its determining
143the kinds of experience and thought that are intelligible possibilities for a person,
144may convey something of its phenomenological role. However, they do not make
145clear its nature. My view is that pre-intentional emotions consist principally of a
146kind of bodily feeling. Some ‘bodily feelings’have the body or parts of it as their
147object, some have intentional objects external to the body (in addition to or instead
148of having the body or part of it as an object), and others comprise background
149orientations that are presupposed by intentional states. Elsewhere, I have argued for
150this position at length (Ratcliffe 2008). Hence, in what follows, I will offer no further
151defence of it. What I instead seek to do here is argue for a distinction between
152intentional and pre-intentional hope, and then distinguish some of the forms that pre-
153intentional hopelessness can take. Pre-intentional hope, I will argue, is not simply
4
My use of the term ‘pre-intentional’complements that of Strasser (1977). The term is also used in a
similar way by Searle (e.g. 1983, p.156).
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154‘lost’or ‘retained’. It can also undergo various kinds of change, which affect one’s
155capacity for intentional hope in different ways. Any of these might be described in
156terms of ‘despair’or ‘hopelessness’. Hence, when it comes to the experiences of
157hope and its loss, we miss something philosophically important, something essential
158to an understanding of certain kinds of human suffering, if we restrict our thinking
159to intentional states of a given type. My account also has potential practical
160implications, in psychiatry and therapy for instance. Suppose two people who both
161insist that ‘all hope is gone from my life’are actually relating very different kinds of
162experience, which can be distinguished by a philosophically informed interpreter.
163This might well prove informative when it comes to psychiatric diagnosis, treatment
164and—more generally—how we relate to people who complain of losing hope or
165despairing.
166Radical hope
167I will distinguish ‘losing hopes’from ‘losing hope’by considering a particular way
168in which a hope can become unsustainable. It is important to distinguish loss of hope
169from disappointed hope. Disappointment involves recognition that ‘it is not the case
170that p’, whereas loss of hope over pis a matter of ‘it will not be the case that p’or,
171alternatively, ‘pwill not have occurred, even though I don’t have confirmation of this
172yet’. My focus here is on the latter. Losing the hope that psometimes involves
173adopting a different attitude towards p, such as ‘I am resigned to the fact that pwill
174not happen’. In this case, the proposition p(or not p) continues to feature as the
175content of some attitude. However, another way of losing hope is when the attitude
176becomes unsustainable because the content is recognised to be meaningless. Suppose
177one hopes to score a goal in a cricket match, but comes to realise that one was confused
178about the rules of cricket. Here, hope is not replaced by a different attitude incorporating
179that same content, such as ‘it is sad that I will not score a goal in cricket’. Perhaps some
180hopes are like this—confused from the start. (The hope of surviving one’s death as a
181disembodied soul seems like a good candidate to me.) However, more common are cases
182where once meaningful possibilities are lost, perhaps due to cultural change. For
183instance, it no longer makes sense to hope that one will be paid fifty French francs for a
184day’s work, because the franc has been replaced by the Euro.
185Is it possible for all one’s hopes to lose their intelligibility in this way? Jonathan
186Lear (2006) thinks so. He considers the testimony of Plenty Coups, the last chief of
187the Crow nation, and suggests that the Crow may well have endured the collapse of a
188system of meanings that all their hopes and activities depended upon. Various
189practices around which the Crow structured their lives lost their intelligibility due to
190historical change. Take the example of planting a “coup stick”in the ground, which
191served as a commitment to not abandoning the stick or retreating in battle. When
192anticipating a battle, everyone accepted the proposition “either our warriors will be
193able to plant their coup sticks or they will fail”(Lear 2006, p. 25). There were no
194other possibilities to consider. A warrior might hope to place a coup stick in the
195ground or, alternatively, consider the situation hopeless and resign himself to failure.
196However, both these attitudes presuppose placing a Coup stick in the ground as an
197intelligible possibility. Once the Crow were moved to a reservation and the US
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198government enforced a ban on tribal warfare, the possibility of such actions ceased—their
199meaning was lost. How encompassing was this meaning loss? One might think that many
200other activities, like cooking, would have remained unaffected. However, Lear maintains
201that such activities were embedded within a “larger scheme of purposefulness”.The
202meaning of cooking was not restricted to preparing food in order to feed hungry mouths;
203“every meal was in effect the cooking-of-a-meal-so-that-those-who-ate-it-would-be-
204healthy-to-hunt-and-fight”(2006, pp. 39–40). Hence, although the Crow could still
205cook and eat, the richer meanings of these practices were gone; a way of life was lost.
206Is what Lear describes something that can happen to a person or group, regardless
207of whether or not it actually happened to the Crow? It is surely plausible to claim
208that major cultural changes can involve a significant degree of meaning loss.
209However, what about a complete loss of the practical meanings that one’s hopes
210presuppose? Regardless of whether or not this fate can befall an entire culture,
211something along similar lines can, and often does, happen to individuals. Consider
212the experience of profound grief. Suppose a person has spent the last thirty years in a
213loving relationship with a partner. It might well be that all or almost all her activities
214and projects (other than those that are purely functional and would not ordinarily be
215associated with attitudes such as ‘hope’anyway) make reference to the partner, are
216regulated to some extent by it, and take on the significance they do because of it.
217Every Saturday, it is ‘we’who get up and head to the café for breakfast, ‘we’who
218take it in turns to make lunch and ‘we’who enjoy drinking wine together in the
219evening. When options such as ‘a bottle of wine tonight or no bottle of wine tonight’
220are contemplated, the partner’s participation in both scenarios is taken for granted.
221Even activities that the partner is not directly involved in implicate him/her in
222various ways. For example, money is earned in order to sustain ‘our ’life together.
223The contents of all the person’s hopes, all her aspirations, thus involve her partner.
224For someone in this situation, the partner ’s death could, I think, render all hopes
225meaningless. It is not that she would cease to hope for various states of affairs, but
226that these states of affairs would no longer make sense. Consider Auden’s poem
227Funeral Blues, which ends with the words “nothing now can ever come to any
228good”. This is reminiscent of Lear’s interpretation of Plenty Coups’assertion that
229“after this, nothing happened”(2006, p. 2). There comes a time when the meaningful
230possibilities presupposed by all one’s hopes cease to be. After that, nothing of any
231consequence could happen. Auden’s poem also emphasises how all the meanings of
232a life can depend upon being with another individual: “He was my North, my South,
233my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest”. Grief is experienced as a
234catastrophe that befalls one’s whole world.
5
235Various other events can similarly lead to a pervasive loss of hope contents.
236Consider, for example, a dedicated employee who loses a job she has performed with
237pride for many years. What she hopes to achieve, hopes to be, hopes to experience
238and hopes to avoid all refer back to that professional role. In its absence, very little
239survives intact. Hence, it is arguable that meaning catastrophes of the kind Lear
240describes are not so uncommon at the level of the individual. The collapse is surely
5
This kind of meaning loss does not exhaust the experience of grief. My claim is just that it can be an
aspect of grief.
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241no less severe for that individual when it affects only her own idiosyncratic system
242of meanings. Granted, she can still conceive of the broader meanings of a culture,
243but these alone are not enough to constitute the meaningfulness of her life. She must
244also be able to make some of these meanings significant in ways that are specific to
245her. For instance, it is not enough that one’s culture offers the possibilities of being a
246chef, a police officer or an academic. The content of a person’s hopes depends more
247specifically upon which of these possibilities she has made her own.
248Let us accept that it is possible to lose all or most of one’s hopes due to a
249breakdown of content intelligibility: one recognises that the content no longer makes
250sense and is consequently unable to adopt an attitude with that content. Does this
251amount to a ‘loss of hope’? Lear ’s answer is no—a kind of hope can remain. He
252calls this “radical hope”, because it is directed at a good that one currently lacks the
253conceptual resources to understand (Lear 2006, p. 103). Somehow, the Crow found
254the ability to carry on, rather than giving up completely. Lear suggests that their
255ability to do so may have rested upon how they interpreted a dream vision
256experienced by Plenty Coups in 1855 or 1856. The dream pointed to something that
257could not be fully understood, while at the same time offering the reassurance that
258this could somehow be endured. The kind of hope they retained was devoid of
259specific content; it incorporated only the “bare idea that something good will emerge”.
260All Crow possibilities might be gone, but what remained was “the possibility of new
261Crow possibilities”(2006,pp.94–98).
262Radical hope could be interpreted as an intentional state of the form ‘I/we hope that p’,
263with a vague or very general content, such as ‘good will ultimately come of this’.
264Although it is easy enough to describe it in such terms, this interpretation is
265implausible. First of all, it is not at all clear what pis. The same hope can be expressed
266in all sorts of ways, such as ‘possibility will return’,‘we can continue’,‘things will
267eventually work out’,‘we must have courage’,‘nobody knows what the future might
268bring’,‘we will survive or prevail’,‘the world is ultimately good’and ‘life will go on’.
269Not all are synonymous and it is doubtful that they all refer to a single, core
270propositional content. Second, it is only given very general possibilities of the kind
271‘things may turn out for the good’that one can adopt attitudes with the more specific
272content ‘this particular state of affairs may turn out for the good’and, by implication,
273the more specific attitude of hoping for something. That there are possibilities of that
274kind is something that all intentional states of the type ‘hope’presuppose.
275Hence, I propose that radical hope is not an intentional state with some specifiable
276content but, instead, a kind of general orientation or sense of how things are with the
277world, in the context of which intentional states of the kind ‘I hope that p’are
278possible. By analogy, having a sense that ‘there is a future’might be described as the
279belief that p, where pis ‘there is a future’. As in the case of ‘the hope that p’,itis
280trivially easy to offer such linguistic constructions, but it is also misleading. A sense
281of there being a future is presupposed by the possibility of intentional states of
282various kinds, such as desire, hope and anticipation. Without it, states of those kinds
283would not be intelligible. It is also doubtful that one could have beliefs without any
284sense of the future—it is arguable that the concept of belief implicates possibilities
285such as checking, confirming and repudiating, all of which presuppose some sense
286of future possibilities. The difference is that radical hope is more specific than ‘there
287is a future’. It is also a sense of that future as offering certain kinds of possibility,
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288principally some vague sense of the good that attitudes including intentional hope
289depend upon.
6
290An implication of my interpretation, which parts company with Lear’s account, is that
291radical hope is not something people only occasionally have, at times when other hopes
292have lost their meaning. Instead, it is something most of us have most of the time, a
293context in which our various hopes are formed, nurtured and lost. What Lear succeeds in
294doing is distinguishing two different kinds of hope by showing how ‘hope’of a kind can
295remain even when all ‘hopes’are lost.
7
What is notable about Plenty Coups’predicament
296is not that he summoned up radical hope in such circumstances but that he managed to
297retain it. He might not have done, and the same goes for those suffering from profound
298grief—one can lose the ‘will to go on’. Indeed, the fact that some people do and others
299don’t, even though both may have suffered a comparable erosion of hopes, makes the
300contrast between ‘loss of hopes’and ‘loss of hope’all the more salient.
301A less extreme erosion of past meanings and openness to new meanings characterises
302human life more generally. Also, the background orientation through which change and
303uncertainty are met varies in structure from person to person and time to time. The
304degree to which we ‘have hope’can be affected by life events, health, mood and other
305factors. On some mornings, one gets out of bed to find the world thoroughly enticing,
306filled with possibilities for good things. On other days, the world can seem dull,
307threatening, bereft of the possibility of positive change. However, for most of us most of
308the time, there is at least some degree of pre-intentional hope, a general sense that things
309might turn out for the good. It is in the context of this that more specific hopes are
310formed and projects take shape.
8
311A loss of radical hope (hereafter just ‘hope’) would be a deeper or more profound
312kind of experience than a loss of all hopes, as one would not only lose however many
313actual hopes but also an orientation that is presupposed by the possibility of hoping for
314anything. Steinbock (2007) aptly describes such a predicament as loss of the “ground
315of hope”. He proposes that the capacity to hope that ppresupposes trust in something
316external. This ‘trust’is at the same time a sense of the kinds of possibility that the
317future has to offer. Its loss, he says, amounts to the most profound challenge to hope
318that we can ever face. Steinbock refers to this as ‘despair’:“when I despair, I
319experience the future as closed of meaningful possibilities that should otherwise be
320there”(2007, p. 449). This does not capture all or perhaps even most everyday uses of
321the word ‘despair’. If despair were a complete loss of the intelligibility of hope, one
322could not—as people sometimes do—talk about ‘depths of despair’; one would either
6
An alternative approach is to construe radical hope as ‘meta-hope’, the intentional state of hoping for the
return of hope. However, as my discussion of depression will show, loss of radical hope can amount to a
sense that intentional hope (including the hope that hope will return) is impossible. ‘Loss of meta-hope’
might account for a total absence of hopes but it does not account for this sense of impossibility.
7
Pre-intentional hope is thus akin to faith in some respects, but they also differ. Faith can have a
determinate content, whereas radical hope survives the loss of all such contents. Also, faith can involve
unwavering certainty whereas radical hope is a sense of there being certain kinds of possibility.
8
McGeer (2004) describes what I think is the same thing. Rather than assuming that hope is a kind of
intentional state, she construes it as a drive towards the future that is integral to human life and inseparable
from the capacity for action. See also Webb (2007, p. 68) for a distinction between intentional hope and
“open-ended hope”, where the latter takes the form of a general “orientation toward the future”. Webb
distinguishes three principal kinds of intentional hope and two kinds of open-ended hope.
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323despair or one wouldn’t. Also, the term ‘despair’can also be used to communicate an
324intentional state with a specific content, such as ‘I despair over the state of Higher
325Education today’. Such talk conveys a sense of resignation in relation to a specific
326state of affairs that one finds undesirable. However, the fact that Steinbock’s use of the
327term ‘despair’is either a technical or, to some extent, revisionary one does not detract
328from his distinction between loss of intentional hope and loss of what it depends upon:
329“even if I experienced hopelessness in every particular instance, the sum of these
330experiences would not equal despair because the ground of hope can still function
331guidingly”(Steinbock 2007,p.448).
332However, I will now argue that matters are more complicated than this: loss of hope
333can itself take a number of forms, which differ from each other qualitatively rather than
334just in the degree to which hope has been lost. In the remainder of this paper, I will
335distinguish five broad kinds of predicament that involve losing hope rather than just
336hopes:
3371. Absence of the capacity to hope for anything (sometimes found in severe
338depression),
3392. Absence of the capacity to hope for anything, combined with lack of awareness
340that anything has been lost (perhaps also found in some cases of severe
341depression, and elsewhere too),
3423. A more specific loss of ‘aspiring hope’(hope of bettering oneself or improving
343one’s life), which can occur with or without awareness of absence,
3444. Loss of a sense of one’s own future as a dimension of hope, a predicament of
345‘demoralisation’that need not involve complete loss of the capacity for hope, and
3465. Loss of trust in the world, which renders all hope ‘fragile’and may restrict the
347scope of potential hope contents.
9
348All five involve loss or privation of something that intentional hope presupposes.
349Hence, it is not enough to merely contrast loss of hopes with loss of hope (or of the
350‘ground of hope’), as the latter takes different forms. As will become clear in what
351follows, (2) is the deepest form of loss, followed by (1). However, I doubt that the
352structural differences between (3), (4) and (5) amount to differences in depth. Hence,
353I do not attempt to rank them against each other.
10
354Depression
355Many first-person reports of hopelessness in severe depression indicate that it
356involves more than a lack of specific hopes, however encompassing their content
357might be. It is the possibility of hoping that is experienced as absent.
11
The capacity
9
I do not include ‘pessimism’, which I take to involve a disposition to form fewer intentional hopes,
rather than a loss or privation of something presupposed by the intelligibility of intentional hope. Even so,
my list is not intended to be exhaustive, and I do not want to rule out the possibility that there are other
ways of losing hope, which differ from anything described here.
10
In referring to emotional depth, I am assuming an account of depth that I develop in Ratcliffe (2010a;
2010b).
11
I do not wish to suggest that all cases of diagnosed severe depression involve loss of ‘hope’in this
sense. My position is that many of them do, as exemplified by first-person accounts.
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358to hope presupposes a sense of the future as a dimension in which significant
359possibilities might be actualised. Furthermore, those possibilities need to have a
360certain kind of significance; they have to be ‘desirable’in some way, rather than, say,
361threatening. If future possibilities were only experienced in terms of threat, then hope
362would not be possible. In severe depression, it seems that an orientation towards the
363future that is presupposed by intentional hope can be transformed in such a way as to
364prohibit its possibility.
12
Consider the following description:
365366Although depression alters perceptions in multiple ways, the social world
367seems to lose its normal temporal dimension for most sufferers. Their present
368bad feelings so thoroughly capture them that the sense of hope and security
369normally framing images of a future is destroyed. ( Q1Karp, 1996, p. 27) 370
371
Where Karp talks of a sense of hope and security ‘framing’the future, he is not
372referring to a specific hope content but to a more general sense of the future that shapes
373all experience and thought. Without it, nothing is practically significant anymore,
374nothing beckons activities and so nothing offers the possibility of meaningful change.
375Also, without a sense of the future as a dimension of meaningful change, one cannot
376hope—it is ‘hope’itself that has gone. Numerous testimonies support this interpretation.
377For example, Styron (2001, p. 58) describes reaching a stage where “all sense of hope
378had vanished”.Brampton(2008, p. 1) similarly describes depression as “aparalysisof
379hope”. She later stresses the extent to which this differed from more familiar, less
380profound feelings of hopelessness: “There were no words to explain the depths of my
381despair. I didn’tunderstanditmyself”(2008, p. 18). The predicament is often
382expressed in terms of having no hope of recovery from depression. Because one lacks
383a sense that things could be significantly different from how they currently are,
384recovery seems not only unlikely but impossible:
385386My father would assure me, sunnily, that I would be able to do it all again,
387soon. He could as well have told me that I would be able to build myself a
388helicopter out of cookie dough and fly it to Neptune, so clear did it seem to me
389that my real life, the one I had lived before, was now definitively over.
390(Solomon 2001, p. 54)
13
391
392
This is not to suggest that a sense of the future has altogether gone in severe
393depression. In place of a structured system of significant possibilities, of the kind
394required for the intelligibility of projects, goals and hopes, sufferers often report that the
395future is experienced in terms of all-encompassing dread (e.g. Solomon 2001,p.28).
396Again, this predicament is not an intentional state or any number of intentional states.
397Rather, it is a shift in one’s sense of what kinds of possibility the world has to offer and
398thus in the kinds of intentional state that one can adopt. People with depression often
399stress the extent to which the ‘world’of depression differs from the everyday world.
12
See, for example, Fuchs (2001) and Wyllie (2005) for further phenomenological discussion of
anomalous temporal experience in depression. The theme also features in almost every detailed
autobiographical account.
13
One might object that the severely depressed person can still hope for death, and that some kind of
desperate hope therefore persists. This is sometimes so. However, many authors explicitly report having
had a sense that nothing could bring relief, that the predicament was eternal, inescapable.
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400For example, Rowe (1978, p. 269) quotes a patient who says, “I awoke into a different
401world. It was as though all had changed while I slept: that I awoke not into normal
402consciousness but into a nightmare”.Styron(2001,pp.14–15) similarly refers to “a
403form of torment so alien to everyday experience”, like “drowning or suffocation”.Itis
404the whole structure of world experience that is affected, rather than experiences that
405occur within an already given space of experiential possibilities.
406It is therefore important not to confuse ‘loss of hope’in depression with a ‘loss of
407hopes’that can be described in superficially similar ways. Confusion surely occurs.
408For example, Carl Elliott raises concerns about use of selective serotonin reuptake
409inhibitors to treat something that is:
410411…not so much depression as a peculiar sense of feeling lost in the world, the sense
412that all the old structures that once gave life sense have disappeared, that we have
413been abandoned and lost at sea, castaways on a lonely island. (1999,p.53). 414
415
This sounds more akin to the kind of scenario discussed by Lear, where the
416meanings of a life are eroded and the intentional hopes that presuppose those
417meanings are consequently lost.
418It is evident from first-person accounts of depression that hope is not simply
419absent—the absence itself is unpleasantly salient; it is felt. How can we account for
420this? A person might remember that things used to be different. However, this does
421not suffice for a feeling of absence or loss: that I remember pdoes not imply that the
422current absence of pis experienced as an absence. However, there are all sorts of
423circumstances where things change and we do experience an absence. For example,
424when a piece of furniture is moved from its usual place, one might enter the room
425and be immediately struck by a feeling that something is missing, that things are not
426quite right. What is disappointed here is not an explicit propositional attitude of the
427form ‘I expect that p’, but a kind of habitual, bodily expectation. When I enter my
428office in the morning, I do not at that moment have propositionally structured
429expectations concerning the precise locations of hundreds of different artefacts
430(although I may do for some of them). Nevertheless, any number of different
431disturbances could give rise to a feeling of something being missing, unfamiliar or
432somehow not right. Of course, one might claim that I possess all these attitudes
433implicitly. However, that would be to insist upon an implausible proliferation of
434propositional attitudes. Furthermore, disappointment of a propositional attitude does
435not always involve experience of something being absent from the scene or not quite
436right. The two, therefore, need to be distinguished. This is something that Edmund
437Husserl addresses, in his detailed analysis of the non-propositional “origin of
438negation”in the “prepredicative sphere of receptive experience”. Our default
439attitude, he suggests, is a habitual sense of certainty—a non-propositional, bodily,
440practical trust in the world. However, various felt attitudes can run counter to this,
441constituting a sense of doubt, uncertainty or negation. When this happens, there is
442a“consciousness of otherness which disappoints anticipation”(Husserl 1973, pp.
44388–90). Similar themes are developed by Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, with
444more specific reference to the experience of absence. One enters a café expecting to
445meet Pierre, only to find that he is not there. However, his absence is there—the café
446retains its status as a largely indeterminate perceptual backdrop to the central figure
447of Pierre and, when Pierre fails to appear, his absence is thus conspicuous. By
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448analogy, the absence of a picture is conspicuous when one sees an ornate picture
449frame with nothing in it.
450Something not unlike this seems to occur in depression. Although one loses a
451certain kind of orientation towards the future, one retains habitual expectations the
452fulfilment of which depend upon it. One can still anticipate perceiving things in
453ways that require having a grasp of significance or a sense of hope. Also, when they
454don’t appear as anticipated, there can still be a feeling of loss, of unfulfilled
455expectation, a sense that a perceived situation is lacking something. Put simply, one
456can expect to hope, even though one cannot hope, and so hope is missed. Something
457along these lines, accompanied by a conceptual memory of things being different,
458amounts—I suggest—not only to the loss of hope but also to a feeling of its loss.
459Steinbock makes the complementary point that even despair somehow depends
460upon hope—it is experienced as a loss of the ground of hope and therefore
461presupposes some lingering sense of what it is to hope. Despair involves not only an
462absence of hope but a sense of its absence; hope is “experienced as impossible”
463(2007, pp. 448–450). However, we should also consider the possibility of a loss of
464hope so profound that one also loses a sense of what has been lost. I have suggested
465that depression can involve something akin to a pervasive sense of unfulfilled
466expectation. However, suppose one endures such a predicament for a prolonged
467period. Might the expectations themselves fade, along with the feeling of loss?
468Might one forget—in a habitual, practical way—what it was like not to be
469depressed? This would be analogous to losing a limb, where there is a gradual
470process of adjustment that renders the awareness of loss less pronounced. Various
471remarks indicate that depression can involve forgetting how things were before one
472was depressed. For example:
473474You can’t…even remember what its like to go and do something and feel
475pleasure from it. You look at the world, the array of things that you could do,
476and they’re completely meaningless to you. (31-year-old woman quoted by
477Karp, 1996, p. 32) 478
479
It is not clear from this passage whether the author is saying that she could no longer
480rekindle the relevant feelings or that she could not even remember that she used to feel
481pleasure. I suspect it is only the former. Even so, if this were so for hope, loss of hope
482would not incorporate any experiential contrast with hope, any more than my memory
483that I used to experience the world differently when I was a 5-year-old shapes how I
484experience the world now. Hence, it is not clear that loss of hope has to depend upon a
485sense of what it is to hope. The deepest or most profound loss of hope would be one
486involving no awareness of what has been lost. We can admit that the difference between
487the two experiences is a matter of degree—one could come to miss hope less and less, as
488one’s expectations adapt to a world without it.
489Loss of aspiring hope
490Complete loss of all sense of hope is surely rare. However, if we restrict ourselves to
491a less extreme scenario, where someone lives without certain distinctive kinds of
492hope and remains oblivious to their absence, it is arguable that the unknowing
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493absence of hope is quite widespread.
14
Take someone bereft of any aspiration to be
494better, any hope of improving her situation or any sense of there being worthwhile,
495long-term projects. The only possibilities for hope that life offers her are associated
496with transient pleasures and distractions. Although not a total loss of hope, this at
497least involves a structural change in pre-intentional hope, a privation, a limitation
498upon the kinds of hope that she is capable of. In The Sickness unto Death,
499Kierkegaard identifies something similar to this as a variant of ‘despair’. Writing as
500Anti-Climacus (and explicitly acknowledging a discrepancy between his own view
501and that of his pseudonym), he distinguishes several forms of despair. These, he
502says, involve impoverishments of self that people are usually unaware of, rather than
503phenomenologically conspicuous losses of hope. Most people are in unknowing
504despair most of the time, and their obliviousness renders that despair more profound.
505Hence, the usual view of despair as a conspicuous and rare emotional state is
506mistaken (Kierkegaard 1989, p.52, pp. 62–63).
507For Anti-Climacus, despair is a failure to recognise potentialities that are integral
508to one’s being, with only Christianity offering the possibility of salvation from it. So
509it is not only common among non-Christians but ubiquitous. It is thus clear that his
510conception of despair departs substantially from more familiar uses of the term.
511Also, it departs equally from my own subject matter, given that it is not first and
512foremost a matter of lacking hope. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s discussion remains
513relevant to a consideration of oblivious loss of hope. He characterises certain forms
514of despair in terms of an absence of the sense that there are non-trivial possibilities.
515A person might only do what is safe, what is specified by the norms of his society, to
516such an extent that he forgets there are other options. He “finds being himself too
517risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number,
518along with the crowd”. Kierkegaard refers to it as a retreat from “venturing into the
519world”(1989, p.64).
15
This ‘despair’is a limit on the kinds of aspiration one is
520capable of having, one’s sense of what the future might hold. Kierkegaard explicitly
521construes it in terms of a loss of possibility (1989, p. 70). What one loses though is
522not simply possibility, but a sense of there being certain kinds of possibility. Also,
523something not unlike this can be legitimately described in terms of the loss or
524absence of hope. There is a distinction between hoping to obtain something and
525aspiring to be something, to accomplish someone or to improve one’s life. The sense
526that ‘I am not all I could be’,‘I am not all I should be’or ‘my life could/should be
527better’is surely integral to many lives, a drive or orientation that shapes a person’s
528various activities and projects. This involves a distinctive kind of hope, the hope of
529being able to surpass one’s current predicament, to improve oneself or one’s situation
530in ways that perhaps lack concrete linguistic description. In contrast to this, a person
531might lack any sense of aspiration, achievement or long-term projects. This need not
532manifest itself as the positive acknowledgement ‘I am complete’or ‘I am all I could
533be’. Rather, it is a failure to recognise the possibility of there being alternatives to
534one’s current situation. That situation is not contrasted with anything else; it is taken
535as given, as the space of possibilities in which one lives. The contrast between
14
This need not involve ‘losing’hope; perhaps some people never had it in the first place.
15
This is similar to what Heidegger (1962) calls ‘das Man’and Sartre (1989)‘bad faith’.
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536having and lacking aspiring hope is not simply a matter of one person having various
537hope contents that the other does not have. Their different hope contents are
538symptomatic of different kinds of possibility that they take the world to offer, different
539senses of what the future might bring.
540Some people complain that depression removes the possibility of aspiring to be
541something; it “prevents you from seeing who you might someday be”(person
542quoted by Karp, 1996, p. 24). However, here, one is—to some extent and for a time
543at least—aware that something has been lost. (Also, in severe depression, as I have
544already indicated, the loss is often more encompassing, extending even to trivial
545hopes.) Hence, it is arguable that a loss or absence of aspiring hope can occur in both
546conspicuous and inconspicuous forms. One might be oblivious to the fact that one’s
547life does not incorporate certain kinds of possibility. Alternatively, one might
548experience the loss, become resigned to the fact that all projects and aspirations will
549come to nothing and sorrowfully settle into an existence of transient distractions.
550Demoralisation
551Another kind of ‘loss of hope’is what one might call ‘demoralisation’or ‘giving up
552on life’. Here, one retains a sense of what it is to hope; what is lacking is any sense
553of hope concerning one’s own future. This differs from loss of aspiring hope because
554one can become demoralised in relation to trivial prospects too. For example, ‘what’s
555the point in going to the pub every week?’It also differs from the loss of hope that I
556described earlier, which can occur in severe depression. Some work in psychiatry by
557Kissane and Clarke (2001) and Clarke and Kissane (2002) serves to make this latter
558difference clear. They propose that we recognise two distinct psychiatric categories:
559‘depression’and ‘demoralisation syndrome’. The latter is defined as follows:
560561…a psychiatric state in which hopelessness, helplessness, meaninglessness,
562and existential distress are the core phenomena. Hopelessness and helplessness
563arise from an experience of feeling trapped or of not knowing what to do.
564(Kissane and Clarke 2001, p. 13) 565
566
Kissane and Clarke (2001, p. 14) argue that this differs qualitatively from
567depression, as anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure) is characteristic of
568depression but not of demoralisation syndrome. However, to complicate matters, they
569also acknowledge that the two often co-occur and that untreated demoralisation can
570lead to depression.
571The suggestion that we regard ‘demoralisation’as a medical condition is contentious
572to say the least. The only criterion that Kissane and Clarke (2001, p. 16) offer for
573distinguishing pathological demoralisation from mundane loss of hope is that the
574former is more intense or pronounced. They do not consider whether equally
575pronounced feelings could be ‘normal’in exceptional circumstances. Neither do they
576indicate what the normal range is.
16
The suggestion that we can draw a clear line
577between those experiences typical of depression and one of ‘demoralisation’is
16
See Parker (2004) for a critique of the attempt to medicalise demoralisation.
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578similarly contentious. Nevertheless, if we set aside the issue of whether demoralisation
579should be construed as a psychiatric illness, one that can be set apart from depression,
580we can still help ourselves to some phenomenological distinctions that they identify.
581For convenience, I will adopt Kissane and Clarke’s contrast between ‘demoralisation’
582and ‘depression’in order to convey these distinctions (although I do not thereby
583endorse it, as it is arguable that the category ‘depression’,oreven‘severe depression’,
584does and should encompass both predicaments). The demoralised person, we are told,
585complains that “I can't see the point anymore. There is no reason to go on”(Kissane
586and Clarke 2001, p. 12). This certainly seems like a loss of ‘hope’rather than ‘hopes’.
587It is a general orientation towards the future that is altered or lost, rather than a number
588of intentional states. The future no longer offers possibilities for oneself, at least not
589possibilities that are in any way enticing. One consequently lacks all hope concerning
590one's future. This differs from lack of aspiring hope because someone who lacks
591aspiration can still hope for all sorts of things, look forward to them, and find various
592possibilities enticing. How does it differ from loss of hope in depression though?
593Kissane and Clarke suggest that an additional ingredient features in depression. In
594demoralisation, one lacks hope (which they construe rather narrowly, in terms of
595‘anticipatory pleasure’), whereas in depression one lacks ‘consummatory pleasure’too.
596Loss of pleasure thus extends further in the latter (Kissane and Clarke 2001,p.15).
597However, elsewhere they indicate that the loss of hope in depression is also somehow
598deeper:
599600The demoralised feel inhibited in action by not knowing what to do, feeling
601helpless and incompetent; the depressed have lost motivation and drive even
602when the appropriate direction of action is known. (Clarke and Kissane 2002,
603p. 736) 604
605
The demoralised person does not lack the capacity for motivation, or indeed for
606hope, but she does experience her future as a realm that is devoid of meaningful
607possibilities for action. Unlike Plenty Coups, she gives up. So demoralisation can be
608described as a loss of radical hope. However, it is not a loss of the capacity for hope
609in the same way that depression is. The person with severe depression cannot
610conceive of any state of affairs offering the possibility of hope, whereas the
611demoralised person retains a sense of what it would be to have a hopeful orientation
612towards the future. She just doesn't have one.
17
Her predicament is not as recalcitrant
613to change as depression; a reappraisal of what the future has to offer, brought about
614by significant and unanticipated events, might lead to a return of hope, whereas the
615hopelessness of severe depression is relatively impervious to such things (Jacobsen
616et al. 2007, p. 141). Loss of hope in depression is thus both deeper and
617qualitatively different. It takes the form ‘my future could not be otherwise’,whereas
17
A less extreme form of ‘demoralisation’may occur in some people who are faced with terminal illness
or other circumstances: not all hope in one's future is lost, but one does cease to experience and think
about the world in terms of longer term possibilities. To a greater degree, one ‘lives in the present’. This is
structurally similar to a loss of aspiring hope but is not the same—one could retain shorter term aspirations
and distinguish these from more trivial pursuits. Giving up on certain possibilities or kinds of possibility
need not be experienced as a bad thing. Indeed, it might involve a sense of relief and an increase in
happiness. Thanks to Havi Carel for these points.
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618demoralisation takes the form ‘my future could be otherwise but it is in fact like this’.
619Demoralisation too is not an intentional state with the content ‘my future is
620bleak’or something similar. It is a more general sense of what the future has to
621offer: ‘my future offers no possibilities for hope’. This differs from depression,
622where we have: ‘my future could not offer any possibilities for hope’. Because
623the demoralised person retains some capacity for hope, demoralisation is
624compatible with imaginatively reliving past hopes. Loss of hope is specific to one's
625own future; it is not backdated to include all of one's life. It is also compatible with
626having hopes concerning the lives of other people.
627Loss of trust in the world
628Various life events can ultimately lead to demoralisation or even a complete loss of hope.
629However, some traumatic events provoke a different kind of change in the structure of
630hope, where all hope is rendered ‘fragile’rather than simply lost. For example, Jean
631Améry (1999, p. 28) vividly describes his experience of torture at the hands of the SS.
632This, he says, led to an enduring alteration in his sense of being in the world:
633634Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.
635The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already
636collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be
637regained. (1999, p. 40) 638
639
Various kinds of traumatic experience can have similarly enduring effects. As
640Stolorow (2007, p. 16) puts it, emotional trauma “shatters”the “absolutisms”that
641constitute the basis for “naïve realism”, thus exposing the “inescapable contingency
642of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety
643or continuity of being can be assured”. What we have in such cases is not a complete
644loss of hope but an enduring sense of its fragility; it is no longer implicitly taken for
645granted as a firm and unwavering basis for intentional hopes. The ‘ground of hope’
646is not absent. Rather, one lives with the sense that it—and everything that rests upon
647it—is threatened, unsafe, without foundation, perhaps even inevitably condemned to
648collapse. This is not specifically a loss of hope; it is a more general loss of habitual
649faith or trust in the world. However, it is, at the same time, a modification of the
650‘style’in which one hopes. All hope is shaped by a lack of confidence, a sense of
651threat, vulnerability, and ultimate futility. This may also limit the scope of potential
652hope contents. For instance, one might no longer be able to hope that ‘things will all
653turn out for the best in the end’, as the pre-intentional structure that determines the
654shape of all one's hopes incorporates a sense that they will not. Hope contents are
655thus more modest, such as ‘situation xwill work out well’.
656Conclusion
657I have distinguished between intentional hopes and the pre-intentional hope that they
658presuppose, and have argued that pre-intentional hope is susceptible to a number of
659different structural changes. Everyday terms such as ‘hopelessness’,‘despair’and
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660the like do not serve to distinguish the various intentional and pre-intentional forms
661of hopelessness. However, more detailed first-person descriptions can convey them,
662at least to someone who is sufficiently attuned to the relevant distinctions. For
663example, there is a fine line between demoralisation and intentional states that might
664be described in similar ways. A person might respond to questions about how his life
665is going by saying ‘I've given up hope’. Further questioning could reveal that the
666‘giving up’actually relates to a number of intentional hopes, perhaps concerning
667employment, a relationship with someone or the chances of achieving a particular
668goal. However, if he further insists that the future offers nothing, he looks forward to
669nothing, and he has no hopes about anything, this is a different matter. Such a
670predicament also needs to be distinguished from no longer being able to entertain the
671possibility of hoping, and from a form of loss that is restricted to certain kinds of hope,
672such as aspiring hope.
673Many descriptions of hopelessness and despair are ambiguous. For example,
674Garrett (1994) distinguishes project-specific despair (despair over failing to achieve
675some outcome), personal despair (despair over one's whole life) and philosophical
676despair (despair over all life). Project-specific despair clearly involves an intentional
677content. However, it is not clear from his account whether or not personal and
678philosophical despair are to be conceived of in terms of a progressive broadening of
679that content. There are other options to consider. For instance, ‘personal despair’
680could be an intentional state that has oneself as its object, a loss of aspiring hope,
681demoralisation or a form of depression that involves an even deeper loss of the
682capacity for hope. As for philosophical despair, a loss of hope over all life, this is not
683the deepest or most profound form of despair if it is just an instance of intentional
684despair that involves accepting a very general proposition along the lines of ‘all life
685is irrevocably pointless’. This needs to be distinguished from a situation where one is
686no longer able to hope or where one cannot even conceive of the possibility of
687hoping anymore.
688Much everyday talk is insensitive to such differences. The same applies to the Beck
689hopelessness scale, where it is not clear exactly what is being measured. Consider
690propositions such as “I don't expect to get what I really want”and “It is very unlikely
691that I will get any real satisfaction in the future”(Beck et al. 1974,p.862).Someone
692might put a tick next to these because a specifically focused intentional hope or a more
693general hope is absent. Alternatively, she might have lost all sense of hope, lost
694aspiring hope or become demoralised. Or maybe she lives with an enduring sense of
695fragility and distrust of the kind that Améry describes. A similar ambiguity is
696generated by an assumption that frames discussion of emotion more generally:
697emotions must be intentional states, non-intentional states or a combination of the two.
698As an alternative to these options, I have argued that some emotions are pre-
699intentional: they comprise modal spaces that determine what kinds of intentional state
700a person takes to be intelligible possibilities.
701Acknowledgements This paper was written as part of the project ‘Emotional Experience in Depression: A
702Philosophical Study’. I would like to thank the AHRC and DFG for funding the project, and my project
703colleagues in the UK and Germany for many helpful discussions. I am also grateful to Peter Goldie, George
704Graham, my colleagues in the Durham University Philosophy Department, an audience at the University of
705Hull and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper. 706
What is it to lose hope?
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