Braucht Hoffnung Gründe? Ernst Bloch über das Hoffen als Affekt und Tugend

Abstract

Abstract Is hope in need of reasons? Cognitivist accounts of hope tend to answer this question in the affirmative, thereby taking hope to be of a belief-like nature and responsive to reasons. Non-cognitivist accounts of hope, by contrast, tend to give a negative answer, thereby taking hope to be a non-cognitive emotion and insensitive to reasons. Ernst Bloch, however, offers a more balanced account of hope in which hope is featured both as an emotion and a virtue (docta spes). This means that hope is different from belief but in need of support by reasons nonetheless, at least in its virtuous form. This double nature of hope can be brought out and defended by comparing Bloch’s conception of hope to the account of hope that Thomas Aquinas develops in which hope is both an emotion and a religious virtue (virtus infusa) and responsive to religious beliefs. Both accounts stand in sharp contrast to William James who takes hope to be a possible basis for beliefs instead. The paper explores the three conceptions of hope and also discusses the conceptual difficulty of how something can be both an emotion and a virtue. What is needed here is a non-Aristotelian conception of passive virtues.