“Dum Spiro, Spero”– “While I Breathe, I Hope”. Life at the Roots of Hope in the Phenomenology of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.

An often unaddressed question about hope concerns its roots. The Ancients clarified it with myth and in the Middle Ages, this theological virtue was symbolized with an anchor, and was alluded to constantly. In Modernity, the advent of the ideology of progress, which was linked to the affirmation of technical over moral action, caused the question of the roots of hope to lose importance. As Hans Jonas observed, the drive to move-forward that is intrinsic to technical action has become the source of our hope, which in turn has taken on the movement of utopia, or in other words, of the prefiguration of an ultimate “good-place” (εὐ-τόπος) the destination of our actions, which however is totally the fruit of our unrestrained imaginative projection, and in fact is positioned in the dimension of the “place-that-does-not-exist” (οὐ-τόπος). The meta-ontopoietic vision of being that was obtained by the phenomenology of life of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (†2014), makes possible in our times the recovery of that lost nexus with the root of hope, that enables hope to draw anew upon the virtualities implicit in the condition of given life, and to delineate the viable road toward the realization of the good possible for which it yearns. In fact, in over forty years of phenomenological reflection, A.-T. Tymieniecka contextualized the Husserlian constituting consciousness in the sphere of the human creative condition, and in turn contextualized this condition in the unity of all that is alive, on the basis of the discovery of the dynamic of the constructive-creative auto-individualization of life, which reveals a unique ontopoietic logos as the driver and ordering force of all being-in-becoming. According to this innovative metaphysical outlook, an original evolutionary ladder of being is delineated that facilitates the re-anchoring of hope to its roots in order to effectively launch it towards its destination.