Axis: Hope — Is hope a force that sustains life and action, or an illusion we ought to let go of?
To hope is not to indulge in illusions: it is a condition of action and progress. Hope directs our efforts toward what is not yet, sustains moral commitment, and opens the future as a field of possibility.
Hope is for Thomas one of the three theological virtues: stretched toward the arduous but possible future good that is beatitude, it relies on the help of divine grace. Far from a lucidity without hope, Christian existence is oriented by the confident expectation of an end that surpasses the powers of nature, which places Thomas at the extreme of the pole of hope.
"What may I hope?" is one of the three cardinal questions of philosophy. The postulates of practical reason, freedom, immortality of the soul and God, ground a rational hope that the highest good, the accord of virtue and happiness, is possible: an avowed principle of hope.
Critique of Pure Reason, Canon of Pure Reason · Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic
Foundations and implications
↑ What grounds itA leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.
↑ What grounds it
Tonality of reality
If reality is ordered toward the good and history progresses, hope is not an illusion but a correct reading of the world. Metaphysical optimism grounds the principle of hope: to expect the best is to attune oneself to the very meaning of the real. Kant indeed ranks hope among reason's cardinal questions, "what may I hope for?".
↓ What it implies
A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.