Abstract
In this essay, I offer an existential-phenomenological consideration of what it might look like to live joyfully after losing social hope. Using the example of the widespread hopelessness that many are feeling in light of the election of Donald Trump, I suggest that the danger of losing hope is that we can also lose our selfhood in the process. In order to develop a conception of “eschatological hope” that would be resistant to the loss of such social and political expectations, I draw specifically on Søren Kierkegaard’s notion that “the expectancy of faith is victory,” and Jean-Louis Chrétien’s idea of “the unhoped for,” in order to develop a model of hope that remains when it seems like all other hope has been lost. Rather than being overcome by anxiety about the future, eschatological hope fosters joy in the present.
Highlights
On the Occasion of a New YearI write this essay at the turn of a new year
Listen to part of what he says there: The new year faces us with its requirements, and even though we enter it downcast and troubled because we cannot and do not wish to hide from ourselves the thought of the lust of the eye that infatuated, the sweetness of revenge that seduced, the anger that made us unrelenting, the cold heart that fled far from you, we do not go into the new year entirely empty-handed, since we shall take along with us recollections of the fearful doubts that were set at rest, of the lurking concerns that were
When we find ourselves in eschatological hope, we are not defeated by despair and not lost in anxiety due to the continuously shifting sands of socio-historical situations
Summary
I write this essay at the turn of a new year. The calendar reads 2017, but I wonder how different things are from so many years that have gone before. I might care about working for legal protections for undocumented immigrants, say, I might allow that to take a backseat in my thought and action (and the resulting conception of my selfhood in relation to it) if I believe that the dangers of climate change pose a greater threat to the moral dignity of the people on whose behalf I am attempting to work In this sense, the specifics of my hope for a better immigration policy might remain in place as desirable, but it would not be overriding as the expected end toward which I orient my own existence at this present time—instead, working to lower global carbon emissions would function in this way. There is no resignation here; instead, this is an investment in the importance of working toward the not yet as already the case
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