Enlightenment Views of Hope

Abstract

This chapter discusses accounts of hope found in the works of important Enlightenment thinkers: René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The paper’s guiding questions are: Where are discussions of hope located within these thinkers’ works? Do the authors provide an account of what hope is? Do they ascribe a certain function to hope? Most authors of the Enlightenment, with the exception of Kant, write about hope in the context of a general account of the passions. Their characterization of hope closely resembles the “standard definition” of hope in contemporary debates. According to this definition, hope consists of a desire and a belief in the possibility, but not the certainty, of the desired outcome. It turns out, however, that Descartes, Hobbes, and Hume advocate a stronger evidential condition for hope than is common today: According to their view, we do not hope for what we take to be merely possible, no matter how unlikely it is; we hope for what we take to be more likely. Kant’s account differs from the other ones in important respects: He does not treat hope as an affect and he does not require a probability estimate, but grounds hope in faith.