Resourcing Hope for Ageing and Dying in a Broken World by Ashley Moyse;

Author:Ashley Moyse; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2022-03-12T21:00:00+00:00

Conversely, where such a perception exists and persists, it does seem such persons are confronted and confounded by a particular form of hopelessness.

Let me explain further: It has been argued that life is meaningful in relation to those values or ideals that one desires to have (and fears losing). In our contemporary Western society, we value, certainly among other values, will, reason and technique. We value the exercise of individual autonomy to determine and to control the experiences and expressions of our lives. We value the concomitant technological rationality which organizes our knowing and our doing so that we might resolve particular problems and pursue practical aims – such that we might secure the artefacts essential to achieving mastery over nature and the commodities of our desires (defeating our fears). Yet such meaning-by-values leaves one vulnerable when such problems prove irresolvable, or such aims prove unreachable.

Such vulnerability risks feelings of meaninglessness. Such meaninglessness can be realized when the values for which we struggle are not there: one aims but ‘aims at nothing and achieves nothing’.56 Despair thus emerges. That is to say, despair can emerge with failed aims and unattained values.

In medicine, the diagnostic might apply as such: Autonomy and technique are such values for which both physician and patient struggle; they are characteristics of human agency we desire and think we have. Yet in the face of irremediable diagnoses, unrelenting prognoses and futile interventions where modern agencies are thwarted by the realities of frailty and finitude, the movement from a meaning-filled life to its repudiation is quick. If one cannot exercise her capacity for self-determination, or the institution of medicine cannot wield its power for controlling the mechanics of living, then our ideals have not been grasped and life made meaningful in relation to such ideals is dissolved of its value.

Despair, then, is a perspective that provokes pessimism through which the world, and its constituent parts and functions, are no longer recognised as holding value. The world ‘seems worthless’.57 While the perspective begins with seeing a possibility of realising that which we value, it concludes that we cannot. It is this conclusion, which provokes persons to despair.58 And despair persists by both ‘fear and anxiety’ as Emil Cioran observes.59 But Marcel has instructed throughout, despair grasps hold of persons caught by the unstable dialectic between desire and fear. Or, as discussed in the first chapter, ‘the accumulation of (desired) possessions and the fear of losing them anew is what causes anguish and eventually despair’.60

Yet such despair is occluded by the promises of alleviating pain and suffering. It is occluded by the late modern narratives that insist one is free, and therefore one’s authentic self, when administering will and reason as though Heracles confronting the crossroads of choice. Despair occluded by the masquerades of a hope at the crossroads, promising to deliver the ‘good death’ by repeating, with the assent of legal and medical opinion in a growing number of jurisdictions, the meaning-by-values that has made not only patients but

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