My colleague, Joshua Thomas has an excellent set of preliminary remarks on his views about hope on his blog, which I recommend you go check out.

Here are a few highlights.  First he distinguishes dreams as the objects or aims of our hopes, distinct from hope itself, which he takes rather to be related to “related to the motivation to persist in attempting to achieve the aim embodied in the dream.”  Although he distinguishes between “casual hopes” and “profound hopes” in accordance with the importance of their respective objects and the seriousness of our respective commitments towards attaining those objects, he stresses that in every case,

by its nature, hope is never unintentional. it may be more or less well focused, but it never comes about accidentally or without making some kind of conscious commitment to it. this suggests that hope is also related to willing.

His provocative final three paragraphs condense his various remarks and synthesize them into an exciting thesis:

it is an important feature of profound hope that its object exceeds one’s immediate powers to bring it about. while doing so requires that the hoper bring to bear all her relevant resources, those fail to be sufficient on their own. the various resources of others must also be secured and coordinated with one’s own and with each other. this is done not simply on the level of interpersonal relationships, though that is certainly involved. it also incorporates varying forms of institutional support. thus, practically speaking, pursuing profound hope involves the intelligent coordination of a wide range of often very difficult personal choices and commitments, including, but not restricted to education, political and religious affiliation and activity, economic planning and execution, community development on multiple levels from local to national and even international, various social alliances, decisions regarding living conditions and what may be sacrificed and what remains necessary. one’s profound hope guides the organization of these overlapping processes and commitments.

hence, profound hope does not reduce simply to the amalgamation of virtues of character; it requires some complicated and demanding, intelligently directed practical activity across a broad spectrum of highly consequential social dimensions. nevertheless, profound hope is nothing without virtues. more importantly, however, as with the relevant practical activities and commitments, it is the presence of hope that brings together and coordinates these virtues, that draws them out, puts them to work, focuses them, and thereby unifies them. in doing so, hope serves to cultivate and develop the virtues.

it is in good part because hope surfaces one’s virtuous nature that profound hope can serve to ground one amidst the most decentering experiences of loss and trauma, when the exterior of things seems only to spell disaster and mock us for being in such straits. but more broadly, insofar as profound hope serves to draw out and activate the virtues as well as determine and coordinate a wide range of personal activities, relationships, and commitments, functionally, profound hopes are unifying principles of selfhood. this is what gives profound hope its moral weight. this is why profound hope is hope worthy of the name. in the remaining installments on hope, “hope” shall refer to profound hope.

Since these formulations are quite new to me, I confess to not having a clear insight into their accuracy but my first reactions are that I very much like the emphasis on the active character of estimable instances of hope.  If hope is to be something we praise, it should be a practice that embodies our excellence, in the sense that it is a powerful expression of ability, rather than a mere quirk of our temperament such that we are “optimistic.”  Active hope, which coordinates one’s efforts in this way expresses neither merely passive longing or a self-deluding epistemology but a deeper confidence.  It is possible that this confidence comes from overestimation of the moral character of the universe or other wishful thinking about one’s circumstances or oneself.  On the other hand it could be a manifestation of a tacit and justifiable self-confidence which not only expresses an awareness of other virtues within the self but actually adds to them an extra virtue for coordinating them–hope.  But then how is hope different from self-confidence?  Maybe it’s in the fact that hope prompts one to look outward towards the opportunities which the world will provide and not just inward to those that one’s own virtues by themselves will.  In this way, it adds to one’s self-confidence an admirable disposition of openness to the world.

What do you think?