The self overcoming: Hope, relationality, and politics

This dissertation regards questions of existential hope amidst social and political alienation. Gabriel Marcel's conception of existential hope along with Ernst Bloch's conception of social and political hope bridge the movements of overcoming personal despair and alienation with the liberation from social and political oppression. Key to the efficacy of both is the viability of human relationships and social experiences devoid of instrumentality and functionalization. Vitality in both public and private realms necessitates a perspective on the human being that is grounded in an ontological conception of change and process that further implicates conceptions of identity and the human person. Conceptions of the human individual founded upon assumptions of stasis, objectivity, and the capability of predication are displaced in the act of hoping by perspectives defiantly opposed to such attitudes of epistemic certainty. Central to this argument is that human relationships are constructed by and through the activities of human beings open to possibilities of engagement without specific ends or goals. Isolation and alienation, both of which are foundational in experiences of hopelessness, are dissolved through a process of developing an open relationship to the uncertainty of being in relation. Martin Buber's work in I and Thou provides a platform for understanding the fundamental and synergistic connection between despair, alienation, and instrumentalization. Alienation and isolation, the fodder of despair, lead to apathy and complacency which stifle action and in turn predicate further hopelessness. Thus, the work of overcoming despair is deeply embedded in the development of meaningful sociality such that human action becomes recognizable. Hannah Arendt's work in The Life of the Mind and The Human Condition provides a basis for understanding human action as founded in thinking, willing, and judging such that the temporal dimensions of a human being's social milieu are implicated in capacities for hoping. Finally, this dissertation argues the movement of hope, either in personal existential circumstances or within the contexts of social and political struggle, can never be a simplistic attitude of optimistic or unrealistic wishing.