The Hope and Despair of Human Bioenhancement by Corby Paschal M.;

Author:Corby, Paschal M.; [Corby, Paschal M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532653964
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2020-04-07T18:58:26+00:00

In this architecture of hope, as constitutive of human striving, one recognizes something simple and primordial. As Pieper writes: “In hope, man reaches ‘with restless heart,’ with confidence and patient expectation, toward the bonum arduum futurum, toward the arduous ‘not yet’ of fulfilment.”804 However, precisely as a human passion, hope is also and by necessity bound by reason. The strivings of a restless heart do not coincide with wishful thinking, nor is hope the stuff of dreams.805 Rather, it is based on reality, and is thus subject to rationality. This does not mean that hope lacks the full character of a passion. Hope always remains an appetitive, and not a cognitive, power.806 As Robert Miner writes:

Although hope (like all the passions) requires a logically prior apprehension, it does not consist in this apprehension. Hope is a motion of the appetite, which Thomas describes as a “certain stretching out of the appetite toward the good” (extensionem quondam appetitus in bonum).807

Thus, as opposed to the Stoic solution, which, supposing passions to be irrational, advocates their total suppression,808 Aquinas proposes passions “moderated by reason” as more fitting to the human good.809

In this process of reason-guided striving, one can identify several points at which reason is required in discerning the object of hope: to recognize goods with the aid of prudence, to determine likelihoods and possibilities, and thus to differentiate between true and false hopes. The formation of hope will take into account the means by which a hoped-for good is possible. Aquinas differentiates two ways: by one’s own power, or by relying on someone else. As noted to this point, modern hope rests on the first way, trusting only in what one can make oneself. In the second case, one hopes with an expectation of receiving help from another.810 This idea that one’s hope may exist in another has special relevance to the theological virtue of hope to which I now turn, whose object (union with God) is not within the human person’s power to achieve, but is realized by the help of divine grace.

Fundamental Hope: Hope as a Theological Virtue

The limitation of ordinary hope to this world and the immanent future is broken open by fundamental hope. Indeed, fundamental hope even goes beyond the large hopes that form part of human history, such as intra-historical aspirations for a better world. It aims, instead, toward something infinite and beyond the human grasp. Such hope emerges before the realization of our limitations; before what Schumacher refers to as “existential limit-situations” that confront us with a choice between hope and despair.811 This is especially evident before the reality of our mortality and death. In the context of faith, fundamental hope is equated with the theological virtue. Indeed, Pieper writes: “It would never occur to a philosopher, unless he were also a Christian theologian, to describe hope as a virtue. For hope is either a theological virtue or not a virtue at all.”812 Accordingly, it is not a virtue that is natural to the human person, nor nurtured through practice and effort.

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