Abstract

The article discusses the extent to which Heidegger’s thinking touches on the question of human hope and pursues the thesis: Even though the concept of hope is used only marginally in Heidegger’s work, the ques­tion of it already accompanies his early thinking and deepens in the later thinking of Being. Although Heidegger takes a critical view of the metaphy­sical concept of hope because of its intentional character and its immanent understanding of time, he at the same time asks for an “original” hope, i.e., for the original experience of hope and for the origin of “calculating” hope. If the temporality of care is already implicitly a temporality of hopeful exis­tence, then waiting, as conceived by the “Feldweggespräche”, is a being awake, i.e., a being open and present in serenity. Pure waiting points into a letting that lets us hope. Waiting, i.e., letting go of all hope, we open ourselves to an affirmation that promises itself to us as gift and moment in the temporal experience of being-given. Heidegger’s question could therefore be formulated as: What makes us hope?