I am beside myself with joy at having stumbled across a group of ancient philosophers known as the Elpistikoi or the Elpistics. Elpis is the Greek word that roughly overlaps with the English word hope. Hence, one could translate the Elpistikoi as the Hopefulists.
I stumbled across a mention of them while reading parts of the essay “On The Nature of Hope In Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis”:
Virtually all that has been said about hope and re-creation in the fields of psychotherapy, group dynamics and sociology has already been said within various religious and philosophical traditions. For example, the myth of Pandora and her ‘box’ continues to fascinate us, especially because one version of the story is that hope was a curse and punishment, and another that it alone offered the possibility of relief from the torments of life. In Greek mythology Elpinor was the God of Hope. Elpistic philosophers believed that nothing maintained and preserved the life of man better than hope itself. The central debates of modern philosophy concern the possibility of ethics without a belief in hope for a life after death. For example, consider the questions raised by Kierkegaard, Nietsche [sic], Sartre and Camus in their essays on existentialism and essentialism.
An intense feeling of serendipity washed over me as I read the sentence about the Elpistic philosophers. I thought I was familiar with the major philosophical schools in antiquity, but I’d never heard of the Elpistikoi. I was excited by the prospect that I might be able to tie my work on a philosophy of hope back to this philosophical sect.
So I fired up Google and scoured the web for anything about the Elpistikoi (which I prefer over “the Elpistics” because the latter sounds like The Fantasticks). I found almost nothing.
But what I did find shed light on why there is so little present day discussion of them. It turns out that our only knowledge of them (so far) is a single-sentence mention of them in a work by Plutarch:
What we know about the Elpistikoi all stems from one sentence in Plutarch’s Sumposiaka, and this paucity of evidence gives one sense in which the Elpistikoi are “little-known.” But they have also fallen out of discussion in the last few hundred years, after receiving some discussion in the 1700s, and are thus little known to scholars today.
The Elpistikoi: A little-known School of Greek Philosophers
The Elpistikoi are mentioned as part of an analogy in a discussion of “whether better relishes (opsa) are found on land or in the sea”:
“I,” said Symmachus, “shall approach the topic eagerly, and more dialectically. If an “opson” is whatever makes food more pleasant, then the best opson would be whatever is most capable of applying the appetite to the food.” “So, just as the philosophers denominated “The Hopefulists” (Elpistikoi) declare that what is most essential to life is hoping, on the grounds that when hope is not present to make it pleasant, then life is unbearable, so too we should posit that what is most essential to the desire for food is whatever makes every nourishment ungratifying and disagreeable by its absence.”
So all we know about the Elpistikoi and their philosophical views is their claim that hope is most essential to life because life without hope is unbearable. However, Tad Brennan, the author of “The Elpistikoi: A little-known School of Greek Philosophers,” goes on in his paper to put forth an argument that the Elpistikoi did not just hold hope as necessary for life, but held hope as the telos of life. Here is his imaginging of one of the Elpistikoi debating with the other philosophical schools of their time:
You fools think that the two most important ethical activities are a) discovering the identity of some determinate end, and b) acquiring it. And despite that, all of you disagree about its identity, and most of you say that you have not acquired your end — have you seen any virtuous Stoics of late? But neither of these matters at all to making human life bearable. The most we can say about a determinate end is that each person has to posit at least one object of hope. The Stoics hope for virtue, and the Epicureans hope to maximize pleasure, and this hope makes their lives bearable — equally bearable, despite the radical disagreement about what is worth hoping for. And so far as acquiring it goes, that is no aid to making life bearable — it may actually make it worse if it causes you to lose hope of acquiring it in the future. Furthermore, our theory can explain why all of you disagree in the ways that you do, and explain the behavior of your followers. You will always disagree so long as you think that some determinate object is the end, instead of hope. And your followers will always be content to put up with the unattainability of virtue, knowledge, the Forms, and other rubbish, so long as they can *hope* to attain it in the future!
It’s difficult to describe the emotions that welled up in me as I read this interpretation. This is exactly central claim of the philosophy of hope I am developing(!):
Perpetually sending hope in new directions is the purpose of life.
I discuss this view as emerging from the pragmatists’ evolving views on meliorism in Dewey and Rorty: Sending Pragmatist Hopes in New Directions. Remarkably (serendipitously) I came across the Elpistikoi only a week or so after my essay was published. (Which was definitely a good thing, since such a discovery would have delayed my essay even more than it already was.)
I’ve long told family and friends that I’m quite wary when I think I’ve come up with a radically new idea. I’m worried that the idea could be some form of apophany. I’m always delighted when I find someone has already touched on the subject of one of my ephiphanies because it reassures me that others are seeing similar patterns and making similar interpretations. So connecting with the Elpistikoi is the best of both worlds. It confirms that others have had similar thoughts about hope, and at the same time, it leaves nearly blank canvas for me to elaborate such a philosophy of hope because the only (enabling) constraint is a single sentence in Plutarch.
Finding such a like-minded group of philosophers, despite the tenuousness of a single-sentence connection, feels like coming home. It feels like when I read Rorty’s “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” for the first time and said with great emotion, “I’ve been an ironist all this time, but now I have a name for what I am.”
