Review of Stan van Hooft, HopeDurham, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2011, ISBN 9781844652600,pb, 152pp.

Nancy E. Snow

Published online: 24 September 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

In five chapters, an introduction, and a short epilogue, Stan van Hooft conveys inhighly readable and non-technical prose most of what is important about hope. Hedistinguishes hope from hopefulness, and uses the Aristotelian template of virtue asa mean between extremes to conceptualize each. Hope is a mental state consisting ofcognitions and motivations that moves us to strive for a desired end. Though hopeincludes desire among its motivational components, it goes beyond desire. Thoughsimilar to wish, hope is much stronger and is distinguished from wish in other ways.Wishes, for example, can be for the impossible, such as objects of fantasy, and canpertain to the past. Hope, by contrast, must be for what is contingent, that is, for thatwhich is possible but not certain, and is future-oriented. Hope is also distinguishedfrom fear, and, interestingly, from prayer, though, like prayer, hope has the structureof supplication insofar as it is a form of appeal to forces beyond our control forsomething we desire. Though hope is not a virtue in Aristotle’s catalogue, van Hooftunderstands hope using an Aristotelian framework. Hope the virtue is a meanbetween despair and resignation on one extreme, and presumption, the convictionthat all will go well for us, on the other. Van Hooft identifies ten conditions that amental state must satisfy in order to count as hope (p. 46).

Hopefulness lies deeper in our psyche than hope, and is a wellspring from whichhope springs and from which it takes its character. It is a disposition or orientation tobe positive and open to possibility. It is related to the qualities of joyfulness, trust,and courage. In an interesting depth analysis of hopefulness, van Hooft suggests thatit lies at a deep reach of our subjectivity, countering deep-seated fears and anxietiesthat pervade our lives, such as the fear of death. As with hope, hopefulness the virtueis a mean between extremes – those of cynicism, which is a deficiency ofhopefulness, and naivety and fantasy, both of which involve having an unrealisti-cally rosy disposition. As with hope, genuine hopefulness must pass the test of theten conditions.

SOPHIA (2011) 50:697–699DOI 10.1007/s11841-011-0280-2

N. E. Snow (*)Department of Philosophy, Marquette University, PO Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881, USAe-mail: nancy.snow@marquette.edu

Hope and hopefulness are the subjects of the first two chapters. In the next three, vanHooft goes on to explore these conceptions in the context of health care, politics, andreligion. These chapters contain robust and rich discussions. However, a methodologicalconcern should be noted. In each of these chapters, van Hooft applies the ten conditionsto discussions of hope, arguing that hope as it arises in these contexts satisfies the tenconditions, and thus, truly counts as hope according to his lights. Yet, ‘hope’ is definedand used in various ways in literature on health care, politics, and religion. Sometimes,as in the political arena, the word ‘hope’ is used, but not defined. It could well be that thedefinitions and uses of ‘hope’ in these contexts overlap significantly with the tenconditions of hope and hopefulness, and consequently, are close enough to van Hooft’sAristotelian conceptions to defuse this methodological concern. Yet, some recognitionof this issue would have been helpful.

Let me indicate some of the strengths and weaknesses of each “applied” chapter.A clear strength of the chapter on health care, entitled, “Hope in the Clinic,” is itssensitivity to the role of caregivers in providing patients with realistic, as opposed tofalse, hope. In an interesting discussion of the physician Sherwin Nuland’sunfortunate attempt to help his brother, dying of bowel cancer, van Hooft examinesthe perils of caregivers’ assuming responsibility for the hopes of others. Instead ofinstilling false hopes in his brother and unnecessarily prolonging his agony throughfailed treatment, van Hooft sensibly maintains that Nuland should have helped hisbrother achieve a good death. Van Hooft’s discussion of hope and death, however,reveals a possible shortfall. Empirical studies show that the hope of the dying candiffer from the hope of the living. Whereas the hope of the living is future-oriented,the dying can have hope in the generation of meanings for the present. In otherwords, deprived of a future, the dying can have hope in and for their present. Itwould have been interesting to see van Hooft grapple with this form of hope, as ithas implications not only for his discussion of hope and death in Chap. 3, but alsofor his contention that hope and hopefulness are exclusively future-oriented.

Chapter 4, “Hope and Politics,” deals with hope in the political arena. It includesinteresting remarks on Barack Obama’s appeals to hope during his campaign for thePresidency of the United States, and discusses hope and progress and politicalparticipation. It also warns against the perils of certain kinds of political hoping, suchas revolutionary thinking and utopianism, and relates them to forms of religioushoping, such as messianism and millenarianism. Here again, including other strandsof thinking would have amplified this account. For example, Hage (2003) arguesthat societies are distributors of social hope, and that the forces of globalization areundermining their ability to do this effectively. Societies that distribute social hopewell create nations of “carers,” Hage (2003) tells us. Those that fail risk creatingnations of “worriers,” who can descend into nationalistic fantasies. An exploration ofthese themes against the background of van Hooft’s Aristotelian conception of hopeand hopefulness would have been fascinating.

Finally, in Chap. 5, “Hope and Religion,” van Hooft offers a remarkablemeditation on hope as the foundation and wellspring of faith. This turns mosttheological thinking about hope on its head; faith is usually seen as foundational forhope, not vice versa. The gist of Chap. 5, I take it, is to counter the arguments by“New Atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins, that religious hope is irrational. VanHooft maintains that religious hope is a reasonable response to the inner anxieties

698 N. Snow

and fears that pervade our psychic lives. Hopefulness is again revealed as anextremely deep and essential psychological force, making possible spiritualsustenance. Van Hooft’s is among the few accounts of hope that discusses thefascinating phenomenon of “cargo cults” and their relation to hope. Cargo cults aregroups of Pacific Islanders who await western material goods – cargo – viewingcargo as gifts from their ancestors. Cargo cults have been identified as a form ofmillenarianism, and, as such, can be understood as akin to religious movementswhose adherents hope for the Apocalypse, the coming of the messiah, the end of theworld, and “Rapture.” Van Hooft does not address the rationality of such beliefs indetail, just as he omits detailed discussion of rationality in his earlier exposition of falsehopes in health care contexts. This leads to the question of whether there is room forfalse hope in his scheme of hope as a mean between extremes. Surely there is. It seemsboth logically and psychologically possible for someone to have hope that liesbetween the extremes of despair and resignation and presumption, while resting onfalse beliefs. Surely such hope is not a virtue, but a flawed manifestation of thedeeper wellspring of hopefulness.

My criticisms of van Hooft’s book focus on “sins of omission” – on areas inwhich adding discussions would have enhanced an already rich treatment. Surelyspace considerations dictated what was left in and kept out. As an introduction to thefascinating world of hope, van Hooft’s book is thorough, engaging, and draws uponmajor stands of thought about hope. It is novel both in that it uses an Aristotelianframework to understand hope, and identifies hopefulness as an important depthstructure in our psychological make-up. I highly recommend it.

References

Hage, G. (2003). Against paranoid nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society. Annandale,New South Wales, Australia: Pluto Press.

Review of Stan van Hooft, Hope 699