The Spirit of Hope

by Byung-Chul Han

The neoliberal regime is a regime of fear. It isolates people by making them entrepreneurs of themselves. Total competition and the increasing pressure to perform erode society. This narcissistic isolation creates loneliness and fear. Our relation to ourselves is also increasingly dominated by fear: fear of failing; fear of not living up to one’s own expectations; fear of not keeping up with the rest, or fear of being left behind. The ubiquity of fear is good for productivity.

To be free means to be free of compulsion. In the neoliberal regime, however, freedom produces compulsion. These forms of compulsion are not external; they come from within. The compulsion to perform and the compulsion to optimize oneself are compulsions of freedom. Freedom and compulsion become one. We voluntarily submit ourselves to the compulsion to be creative, efficient, authentic.

Self-creation, creative self-realization, also has something compulsive about it. We optimize ourselves, exploit ourselves, to the bitter end, while harbouring the illusion that we are realizing ourselves. These inner compulsions intensify fear, and ultimately make us depressive. Self-creation is a form of self-exploitation that serves the purpose of increasing productivity.

Fear isolates people, so collective fear is impossible. Fear does not create a community, a We. In fear, everyone is by him- or herself, in isolation. Hope, by contrast, contains a dimension of We. To hope means ‘to spread hope’, to carry the torch, ‘keeping its flame a radiance of hope burning around one’.18 Hope is the catalyst of revolution, the catalyst of the new: incipit vita nova [Here begins the new life]. There is no revolution through fear. The fearful submit to domination. Revolution can only come about through a hope for another, better world. Today, revolution is impossible because we cannot hope, because we are paralysed by fear, because life deteriorates into survival.

Freedom, without which action in the proper sense is impossible, is already an idea that provides meaning. 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.

To the hopeful, the world appears in a different light. Hope gives the world a special radiance; it brightens the world. Wishes or expectations do not possess this power to change, open up or brighten the world. They simply await the inner-worldly events or objects that satisfy them. Fulfilment and satisfaction are alien to hope. Hope is not bound up with an object or inner-worldly event. It is a mood, even a fundamental mood, that thoroughly attunes [be-stimmt] human existence.

Like hope, trust presupposes an open horizon. To trust someone means to build a positive relationship with that person despite a lack of knowledge of the future. Trust enables action in the absence of knowledge. Knowledge, by contrast, makes trust superfluous.

The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope. That is the dialectic of hope. The negativity of despair deepens hope. The higher hope soars, the deeper its roots. In this, it differs from optimism. Optimism lacks negativity. Amid deep despair, absolute hope makes action possible again. Absolute hope involves an unshakeable belief that there is a sense in things. It is only this belief in sense that gives us orientation and puts us on a sure footing.

Absolute hope is a hopeless hope, or the hope of someone who is without hope, because it arises in the face of total hopelessness. We wrest it from the negativity of absolute despair. It is characterized by a resolute ‘and yet’. As a permanent condition of existence, it is not on its way towards a specific target or nearby harbour. Kafka’s ‘Hopeless’ does not arrive. Not-arriving is the fundamental trait of absolute hope. Absolute hope affords composure and confidence to life. Thus, moving in dangerous waters, Kafka’s ‘Hopeless’ leans back tranquilly.

In our narcissistic society, the movement of blood is, in fact, limited to the narrow circulation within our egos. It no longer flows out into the world. Worldless, we circle around nothing but our own ego. Hope has a vastness. It founds a We. In this, it differs from a wish or a simple expectation.

I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind … it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don’t think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental … Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and ...

Despite being the precise opposite of anxiety, hope structurally resembles it, because – like anxiety but unlike fear, which always involves a concrete feared object – hope is without an object.1 Anxiety relates to something altogether indeterminate. Anxiety concerns being-in-the-world as such. This indeterminacy is precisely what gives it its intensity. The object of hope, the spes qua, also escapes any concrete conceptualization. Hope fundamentally attunes [be-stimmt] our being. Like anxiety, it can therefore be understood as a fundamental mode of being, that is, as an existential.