The Temporality, Modality, and Materiality of Hope

Kresten Lundsgaard-Leth (Aarhus University, Aalborg University)

In this paper, I attempt to present a phenomenological analysis of hope. Usually, people tend to connect hope to future events, but I would argue that hopeful experiences may just as well be intentionally directed towards past and present events. Understanding hope thus requires us to make a transition from temporal to modal categories. Modally speaking, hope clearly operates within the scope of possible (rather than the necessary or the actual) experiences but it is vital here to distinguish the phenomenological possibility of hope from both logical possibility and empirical probability. Having established that hope relates to the possible, we still need to distinguish between three domains of potential “objects” of hope. Here, I suggest a productive application of Kierkegaard’s concept of the ‘aesthetical’, the ‘ethical’ and the ‘religious’ which will allow us to distinguish between the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the pure ‘that’ of hopeful experiences.