Abstract
Hope is needed for persons confronting the limits of human life, antagonised by the threats of death. It is needed also for those health and medical professionals constrained by the institution of medicine, determined by market metaphors and instrumental reasoning. Yet, despair can masquerade as hope for such persons when functional hoping for particular outcomes or aims proves futile and aimless. The following will examine such masquerades, while giving attention to particular expressions of autonomy, which persist as fodder for despair in our late modern milieu. The late classical account of Hercules and his death, as well as contemporary reasons for soliciting medical assistance in dying, will focus on the diagnostics of despair, while a Christian account practicing presence, and of hope as a concrete posture enfleshed by habits of patience, among other virtues, will point toward counter-narratives that might sustain persons in times of crisis and enable persons’ flourishing as human beings, even unto death.
Highlights
As in previous times, we find ourselves in a state of unrest
Hope is needed for those confronting the limits of human life, antagonised by the forerunners of death, whether through disease or decay, and for those constrained by the institution of medicine, determined by market metaphors and instrumental reasoning
We have previously argued the orthodoxy of autonomy and instrumental reasoning in late modernity has elevated the risk of persons succumbing to despair, and serves to nourish such despair
Summary
We find ourselves in a state of unrest. Hope is needed. The following will how the triumph of autonomy in modern bioethics, and the pre-eminence of an incumbent Herculean anthropology, risks, and occludes, despair, while allowing persons, so it is argued, to escape their present or pending experiences of life amidst death Such escape is not due to an exercise of free rational agency, due to the triumph of autonomy, but by way of the fear and anxiety, i.e., the despair, that persists. Those persons soliciting MAiD have included as principal reasons the loss of independence, a desire to control the time and manner of death, the risk of becoming a burden, and the prospect of worsening pain or quality of life They will die chasing meaning, which only escapes them (Ecclesiastes 2), while experiencing neither the depths nor heights of despair (Cioran 1992, pp. 37–38)
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