The Spirit of Hope

by Byung-Chul Han

Hope is fear’s opposite in a linguistic sense, too. The entry on ‘hoffen’ [to hope] in Friedrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary says: ‘by leaning forward, one tries to look further, with greater precision’.2 The hunting term ‘verhoffen’ still carries the old meaning of ‘hoffen’: ‘to stand still in order to listen, to hearken, to pick up the scent’. Thus, it is also said ‘Der Rehbock verhofft’ [The roebuck stops short]. Someone who hopes tries to pick up the scent, that is, tries to find the right way to go.

Hope is a counter-figure, even a counter-mood, to fear: rather than isolating us, it unites and forms communities. Gabriel Marcel writes: ‘“I hope in thee for us”; such is perhaps the most adequate and the most elaborate expression of the act which the verb “to hope” suggests in a way which is still confused and ambiguous.’

Without ideas, without a horizon of meaning, life withers and becomes survival, or – as we see today – the pure immanence of consumption. Consumers have no hope. All they have are wishes or needs. Nor do they need a future. When consumption becomes total, time withers. It turns into a constant present of needs and their satisfaction. Hope is not part of capitalism’s vocabulary. Those who hope do not consume.

Intelligence merely calculates. It is based on ‘inter-legere’, meaning ‘to choose between’. And the choice is between already existing possibilities. Intelligence therefore does not create anything new. Someone who is capable of genuine thought is not intelligent. Only through thinking do we gain access to the altogether other. Someone who thinks, Deleuze would say, is an idiot. The gesture of thinking is ‘faire l’idiot’.1 Only whoever is capable of being an idiot can make a new beginning, break radically with what exists, leave the past in favour of what is coming. Only idiots can hope.

Anxiety radically narrows the field of possibilities and thus makes it harder to gain access to the new, to the not-yet-existing. For this reason, it is opposed to hope, which sharpens the sense of possibility and kindles the passion for the new, for the wholly other.

Hope does not receive its energy from the immanence of the self. It does not have its centre in the self. Rather, the hopeful are on their way towards the other. In hope, one places one’s trust in what exceeds the self. Hope therefore approximates faith. It is the authority of the other as a transcendence that raises me up in the face of absolute despair, that enables me to stand in the abyss. The hopeful do not owe their standing to themselves. That is why Havel believes that hope originates in the transcendent – that it comes from the distance.

Hope, faith and love are related. Achim von Arnim calls them the ‘the three sisters fair’.28 All three are turned towards the other. Those who hope, love or believe devote themselves to the other; they transcend the immanence of the self.

The fundamental formula of hope is the coming-into-the-world of birth.