I’m reading Hesiod’s Works and Days and I’ve come to the part where he tells the tale about Pandora and the box from Zeus.
The story just doesn’t sound right to me. I don’t see how Hope (spes) can be trapped in the box because that would mean that hope does not reach us. Clearly we all have hope. Sometimes we have nothing but.
If an ill were left in the box that we do not have it would be the ability to tell the future. With that plague loose there would be no hope. Now, that would be a plague!
I wonder, if hope really is as beneficial as I’ve been taught to think.
Now, I’m not certain, but when I read that same passage, I tried to consider hope to
be a euphemism for a type of dissatisfaction, an unwillingness to relate to a situation
as it is. I’ve been raised to see hope as a virtue, so all this is hard to swallow, but
despair is not necessarily the opposite of hope.
My two cents.
I was puzzled by this too .If it’s any help the notes to my Penguin translation add -
"Hesiod leaves it ambiguous whether hope is the one solace left to man in the now troubled world or simply one more of the troubles brought by woman . The Greeks did not think well of hope : her constant epithet is tuphlos (blind) "
I think I see what you mean. I’ve often thought about that whilst reading Homer and about Pagan belief systems. But I’ve never been able to see it any other way than that hope is a good thing, mostly; it keeps us going.
BTW, what other possibilities for the opposite of hope were you thinking about?
BTW, what other possibilities for the opposite of hope were you thinking about?
Hmm. Now that’s a stumper. It does’nt come immediately to mind like “Love/Hate, Hot/Cold”
Otther frames of mind as well may not necessarilly have an obvious opposite.
Do they have to?
As for hope? Well. I remember reading the “Hagakure” a long time ago. It’s kind of a guide
on how to be a proper samurai. Did’nt much care for the book, but I remember one passage
where the author describes how unhappy people can be running along the eaves trying to
keep dry in a rainstorm, while the those that allows themselves to get totally soaked will just
deal with whatever needs to be done without that resistance to getting wet.
Odd, but couldnt you look at courage as “an” opposite of hope? Just for fun I mean. For
Example, did’nt Gibbon write about battles where the losing armies fought on with the
“courage of despair”.
The Greek word for “Hope” here is ambiguous, in that it means “expectation” as much as “hope.” Some interpreters take this to mean that the expectation of misery is bottled up. As the other sense of the word took over, the story was updated.
As regards the translation of “hope” as expectation, I dont see any conflict with hope.
When some Zen priests enters a training period they “vow to drop all expectations”.
They’re not abandoning all hope, who enter, nor bottlling up the expectation of 90 days
of misery so much as relating to situations as they are, unmediated by desires for things
to go one way or another.
I think that’s what Hesiod was saying, and I think maybe that’s the beauty of Classic/Heroic
literature. They took things for what they were much better than we, these days, are
capable.
Well, while I’m prepared to see interesting parallels between Buddhist and Stoic (and perhaps Skeptic) thought, I’m less certain we should be interpreting Hesiod this way. Works & Days is largely about not accepting things as they come, but rolling up your sleeves and making things happen.
But my point was not so much that hope and expectation are in conflict, but that we’re seeing the Hesiod passage through a translation, and that’s causing problems.
The primary significance of “hope” in English since the 1200s has been not just “expectation” but “expectation of a positive outcome.” (The OED does show some examples of a usage where “hope” = “expectation” without the addition of positive outcome, but this use is long obsolete.) In the Greek, ἐλπίς can mean “hope” in the sense we’re used to, but it is not required to; ἐλπίζω, derived from the simple noun, can even refer to ill hope. If a Gk. wanted to be very clear, there was εὔελπις, good hope, to fall back on.
West devotes several pages to this perplexing question in his commentary:
