After Hope?

Dorota CHABRAJSKA

Abstract

The essay explores whether the category of waiting, which frequently recurs in various contexts in modern culture, has a philosophical character or may serve as a useful tool in conducting ontological or strictly anthropological analyses. The meanings of waiting discussed in the paper, characteristic of modern day philosophical and literary narratives (in particular those by Martin Heidegger, Edward Stachura, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett), show that the concept of waiting tends to gradually supplant that of hope, traditionally associated with the theistic worldview. In modernity and in postmodernity, the ultimate “horizon” of waiting, regardless of its immediate object, which merely masks the truth about the human condition, is the end of existence. The key element of such a grasp of the meaning of waiting is the understanding of the human subject, seen in modern and postmodern times as essentially receptive: passive and deprived of individual (and, consequently, also collective) agency, or efficacy. A significantly different view of the human subject can be found in the concept of the person proposed by Karol Wojtyła: it is precisely in the person’s agency, or efficacy, that Wojtyła sees her subjectivity. In such a context, the concept of waiting manifests its strictly philosophical nature by unveiling a significant mode of human existence: that of awaiting agency, which is tantamount to fulfillment, based on the subject’s previous consideration of the essence of values and the line between the good and evil. The insights described in the essay may be further developed by a juxtaposition of the meanings of other consequential concepts frequently recurring in today’s culture with their rendition by personalistic thought.