Replacing Emotion With Hope

I have always been suspicious of emotion. The reason is, I suppose, that while it is fun to ride the crest of a wave of emotion, the wave finally ebbs and the motivation it carries ebbs too. I wonder, can I can continue on when my enthusiasm fails? And if not, as is often the case, wasn't the enthusiasm really false from the beginning, an emotional froth ultimately without substance?

This problem is relevant to the disponibilite that Gabriel Marcel identifies as the hallmark of the human person. How, he asks, can I remain available to others through time, i.e. past the time when my emotions buoy me up?

Marcel wrote a book on this question, Creative Fidelity. In it (at p.162) he explains that availability is maintained by an active and creative willing to be available, a willing of myself to remain open to the influx of the presence of the other.

The fact is that when I commit myself, I grant in principle that the commitment will not again be put into question. And it is clear that this active volition not to question something again, intervenes as an essential element in the determination of what in fact will be the case. . . it bids me to invent a certain modus vivendi . . . it is rudimentary form of creative fidelity.

Marcel believes that fidelity is creative when I alter or innovate my way of living in order to preserve my availability to the other. In the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia on Marcel, creative fidelity "creates the self in order to meet the demands of fidelity." My infidelity, my failure to "be there," I see as not the other's fault, but my own, and I try to correct it by changing myself.

Where does the strength to continue to create myself and meet the demands of fidelity come from? What buoys me, Marcel says, is hope, not emotion. Hope is a trust in what does not depend on me, a consciousness of something greater than myself, in which I trust.

Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.

The Philosophy of Existentialism, p. 32. Hope is not stoicism, not a passive acceptance, but an "active patience," something that has kinship with willing rather than emotion and desiring. I place hope in a being greater than me, for an outcome that is not brought about by me, but by that greater power. Hope and humility go together. The flush or flash of pride, often at the core of emotion, is antithetical to it.

And so my desire, in my relationships, is to replace my addiction to emotion by a dependence on an active Hope, a Hope that ultimately rests in Providence, as we all do.