Is hope future orientated?

Can Dogs Hope? part 2

As previously remarked, hope may be out of the reach of dogs and other animals because it requires them to conceive of the future in such a way which is impossible without the aid of some kind of grammar or language. But is hope actually future-orientated? Can we hope for past or even present events?

I want to start exploring this issue by examining a footnote by G. Scott Gravlee, in his interesting article Aristotle on Hope:

Thus I take future events to be the paradigmatic objects of hope and fear. One might argue that it is possible to hope and fear concerning what has happened in the past. "I hope he was not hurt, but I fear that he might have been." However, even in this case, what one is properly hoping for is that the news one will hear (a future event) will be good news (recall that one cannot hope for the impossible, and so one cannot properly hope concerning events that have already happened). One properly the fears the news of past disaster. One only wishes that such disaster had not happened.(1)

I felt this was worth quoting in full, just because there's a bag of interesting issues here. Firstly, the idea that one cannot hope regarding what's impossible - this would effectively rule out hope in a pre-determined universe. Hope is then either dependent on free will, or more broadly indeterminism (if there's randomness in the universe, there is still hope). This seems incorrect - even in a rigidly determined universe, I can still hope for that which I don't have knowledge.

But let's look at an example which would more neatly disprove Gravlee's position. Imagine youhave two friends - let's call them Lisa and Bill. Lisa and Bill are good friends - however, Lisa has fallen deeply in love with Bill, and has told you of this fact. She plans to tell him and you encourage her - unbeknownst to her, Bill has expressed similar feelings for her to you. They are going on a car trip together, and Lisa plans to tell him then. However, there's an accident - the car skids of the edge of a dangerous slope or somesuch, and Bill and Lisa plummet to their deaths.

Now, it seems quite clear to me in this scenario that you could hope that Lisa told Bill that she loved him before they died. Seeing as they are close friends of yours, this could be pretty important to you. This would be hope proper - it would not make sense to say "I wish Lisa had told Bill she loved him before they died" because this implies I already know that they didn't. And it could not be that my hope, like in Gravlee's example, is actually for news that Lisa professed her love to Bill - with both of them dead, such news would be impossible.

So hope can be equally be past orientated - it just so happens that the kind of uncertainty is more typically found in future events. And there's no reason why this can't apply to the present - we could hope for the well being of someone for whom we could never expect to receive news from (imagine if they had travelled to another dimension, from was now impossible to get to - like what happens to Rose in Doctor Who).

But there is still a certain kind of common 'distance' in all of these scenarios where hope is possible - a lack of sensory immediacy, and a lack of knowledge/memory. It doesn't feel to me as if Wittgenstein's challenge to whether dogs can hope, or be hopeful, has been diminished by all this. It does bring some useful clarity though - that what we are dealing with is not an issue of temporal distance but something quite different.

We need now to clarify what a dog's cognitive capabilities might be here.

(1) Gravlee, G.S. 'Aristotle on Hope', Journal of the History of Philosophy 38:4 October 2000, p 469