Life without hope is not worth living. Hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for something good to happen. It can also mean “a feeling of trust.
” In the physical system of reality, we all need hope to survive and to surmount some encumbrances of life. However, hope has dealt with us! Hope is an essential ingredient for sustaining human struggling and anything human beings under the sun do bereft of hope will certainly be in vain. Hope, therefore, is a blessed attitude that enables humans to direct their agency towards the possibility of good life.
In philosophical contexts, where either the possibility of a future life beyond this momentary life or the idea of human progress is accentuated, hope is more often seen as an appropriate and even virtuous Elpis was an ancient goddess in Greek mythology and the etymology of the word hope is traced to ‘elpis.’ The myth has it that Elpis saved mankind from all the evils of the world that had been unleashed by Pandora when she opened her jar and scattered its contents. Only Hope remained inside the jar.
The daughter of Hope the last goddess is Anticipation, that we love because she gives us value. In Latin, Spes (meaning hope) was worshipped as a goddess in ancient Roman religion. Numerous temples to Spes are known and inscriptions indicate that she received private devotion as well as state cult.
No wonder Aristotle’s fascinating philosophy on hope is anchored on his saying that, “One cannot truly hope unless one has.
