The Spirit of Hope

by Byung-Chul Han

In a climate of fear, people worry about repression and so do not dare voice their opinions freely. Hate speech and shitstorms also create fear and thus hinder the free expression of opinions. We even fear thinking. We seem to have lost the courage to think. Thinking proper provides access to what is altogether other. A climate of fear produces a continuation of the same. Conformism spreads. Fear blocks the paths towards the other. What is other escapes the logic of efficiency and productivity, which is a logic of the same.

Only when there is hope can we be on our way. Hope provides meaning and orientation. Fear, by contrast, stops us in our tracks.

The German ‘Angst’ (middle high German ‘angest’; old high German ‘angust’) originally meant ‘narrowness’. Angst suffocates any feeling of vastness, of perspective, by narrowing down and blocking our view. Someone who is fearful feels cornered. Fear is accompanied by a feeling of being caught and imprisoned. When we are fearful, the world seems to be a prison. All the doors that lead out into the open are locked. Fear blocks off the future by closing our access to what is possible, what is new.

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’.

Someone who hopes tries to pick up the scent, that is, tries to find the right way to go.

Hope is a dialectical figure. The negativity of despair is constitutive for hope. Saint Paul also emphasizes the negativity inherent in hope: ‘we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed.’

Those who act with hope act audaciously and are not distracted by the rapidity and toughness of life.

An optimist does not need to provide reasons for adopting his attitude. The existence of hope, by contrast, cannot simply be taken for granted. It awakens. Frequently, it must be called upon, appealed to. Unlike optimism, which lacks all determination, active hope is characterized by commitment. An optimist does not properly act. Action is always associated with risk, and an optimist does not take risks.

There is no fundamental difference between optimism and pessimism. One mirrors the other. For the pessimist, time is also closed. Pessimists are locked in ‘time as a prison’.6 Pessimists simply reject everything, without striving for renewal or being open towards possible worlds. They are just as stubborn as optimists. Optimists and pessimists are both blind to the possible. They cannot conceive of an event that would constitute a surprising twist to the way things are going. They lack imagination of the new and passion for the unprecedented. Those who hope put their trust in possibilities that point beyond the ‘badly existing’.7 Hope enables us to break out of closed time as a prison.

The aim of positive psychology is to increase happiness. All negative aspects of life are ignored. It imagines the world as one giant department store, where whatever we want we can buy. According to positive psychology, everyone is responsible for their own happiness. Its cult of positivity means that the afflicted have only themselves, rather than society, to blame. Positive psychology suppresses the fact that suffering is always socially mediated. It psychologizes and privatizes suffering. What really causes suffering – the social context of delusion – is left untouched. The cult of positivity isolates people, makes them egotistic, and reduces empathy. People are no longer interested in the suffering of others. Everyone looks only to their own happiness and well-being. In the neoliberal regime, the cult of positivity dissolves societal solidarity. Unlike positive thinking, hope does not turn away from the negative aspects of life. It remains mindful of them. Hope does not isolate people; it unites and reconciles them. The subject of hope is a We.

Hope, according to Gabriel Marcel, ‘is engaged in the weaving of experience now in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward’.9 To hope means ‘to put one’s trust in reality’, to believe in it so that it carries with it a future. When we hope, we become creditors to the future. Fear, by contrast, deprives us of all belief, withdraws all credit granted to reality. It thus prevents the future.

Without negativity, intensity is impossible. The sprawling and omnipresent ‘Like’, today’s withered form of experience, lacks all negativity. ‘Like’ is the fundamental formula of consumption. Negativity and intensity evade consumption. Hope also has intensity. It represents a deep prayer of the soul, a passion that awakens in the face of despair’s negativity.

Spirit alone is an onward striding. Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly … it is … ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, ‘Well said, old mole! Canst work i’ the earth so fast?’), until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such time, when spirit has put on the seven league boots, the encircling crust [the world that was], like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth.12 The spirit of hope is likewise an onward striding. It keeps working away amid darkness. There is no light without darkness. The current omnipresent fear is not really the effect of an ongoing catastrophe. We are plagued by vague fears that have structural causes and therefore cannot be linked back to concrete events. 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 form...

The postmodern creative dispositif is not on its way towards a new birth. It lacks the pathos of the new, the passion for the new. It produces only variations of the same.

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.

Paradoxically, social media undermines sociability. It leads, ultimately, to an erosion of social coherence. Although we are extremely well connected, we are not united. Relationships are replaced by contacts. There is no touching. We live in a touchless society. Unlike physical touch, contact does not create closeness. When the other, the thou, becomes a mere ‘it’ that satisfies my needs or bolsters my ego, the relationship to the other withers. The other in whom I see myself reflected loses its otherness, its alterity. Society’s growing narcissism, which leads to the absence of attachment and touch, deepens fear.

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.

Could it be that there are no breaks, no ‘shocks of the new’ to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the ‘weak messianic’ hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen.19

Depression is the exact opposite of hope, which is passion for the new. Hope is the spring, the zest, that liberates us from our depression, from an exhausted future.

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.

Hope is a form of longing. A thinking that is devoid of any hope is ultimately a calculating. It does not create anything new; it does not create a future.

In his acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus seems to allow his theoretical strictures to loosen, and an idea of hope that he never pursued in his philosophical writing seems to impose itself on him. Against his will, he invokes an altogether different hope: ‘the faint sound of beating wings’ and ‘the sweet stirrings of life and hope’.9 Here, hope is no longer resignation, avoidance or the renunciation of life; it is life itself, la vie même. Life and hope become one. To live means to hope.

Spinoza rules out the possibility that hope could open up a space for action that is not accessible to reason. However, hope builds a bridge across the abyss into which reason cannot look. It can hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason does not recognize the signs of what is coming, what is not yet born. Reason is an organ that detects what is already there.

A wish or expectation relates to an object or inner-worldly event. They are point-like. Hope, by contrast, develops a narrative that guides action. It is characterized by narrative length and breadth. Unlike a wish, hope stimulates the narrative imagination. It actively dreams. A wish necessarily involves a feeling of lack, whereas hope possesses a fullness and luminosity of its own. Strong hope does not lack anything. ‘Effervescent hope’ is not an oxymoron. Hope is a force, a momentum. A wish, by contrast, is never forceful.

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.13 If it is intensified, it can even become an elated mood.

As a mood, a fundamental mood, hope is pre-linguistic. It attunes [be-stimmt] language. Hope, experienced in its highest intensity, cannot be a habit or virtue that we acquire or consciously bring about. Inherent in it is a transcendence that exceeds the immanence of the will. As a mood, anxiety, too, lies beyond our will.15 It overcomes us. A mood differs categorically from a habit. Habits do not form quickly. By contrast, we are simply put into moods. We fall into them. They can ambush, capture and transform us.

Hope has an active core. The spirit of hope invigorates and spurs us to action.

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born … Those whose hope is strong see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born.

From Erich Fromm

Hope looks ahead and anticipates. It affords us a power to act and perceive of which neither reason nor understanding are capable. Hope sharpens our sense for what-is-not-yet, the not-yet-born that dawns at the horizon of the future. It is the midwife of the new. Without hope, there can be no departure or revolution. Indeed, it is quite possible that evolution is driven by unconscious hope. Hope is the invigorating force per se, which innervates life and protects it against torpor and paralysis. According to Fromm, hope – as a ‘state of being’, as a mood – is an ‘inner readiness, that of intense but not-yet-spent activeness’.18 In this way, it is an inner source of activity and action. It takes us beyond spent activity, beyond mere hustle and bustle, and brings us into contact with not-yet-spent activeness, with the freshness of the not-yet-born. It rejuvenates our actions.

‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope.19

From Nietzsche

In hoping, we lift ourselves above the badly existing. We forgive it, expecting something altogether other. Forgiveness prepares the soil for the new, for what is other. Hope brings with it a great mildness, a serene calmness, even a deep friendliness, because it does not enforce anything. In Nietzsche’s fitting words, it is a proud and mild mood. To hope means to be intensely prepared for what is to come. Hope increases our sensibility for what-is-not-yet, on which we have no direct influence. Even thinking and acting have this contemplative dimension of hoping, that is, of receiving, of presentiment, of waiting, of granting and letting happen. Pure action is without consecration. At the core of the highest form of activity there is an element of inactivity. Hope introduces us into that realm of being that escapes our will. Willing cannot reach the seed of creation:

Daydreams are born out of hope. Hope stimulates us to imagine new forms of action. To be sure, there are also daydreams that flee from reality and quickly melt into thin air. These are much like illusions or wishful thinking. Active hope, by contrast, nourishes those daydreams that are anchored in reality, that form and create the future. Active hope is expressed in a refusal to put up with the badly existing. In its daydreams, this kind of hope is determined to act. Daydreams are ultimately dreams of action. They dream away the badly existing in the interest of a new and better life.

Daydreams, by contrast, suggest a We that is ready to act to improve the world. Only daydreamers are capable of revolution. Daydreams have a political dimension and a utopian potential, whereas night-dreams do not go beyond the private. Beauty, sublimity and transfiguration are possible only in daydreams. Night-dreams lack utopian breadth and momentum. They are disinclined to act. Revolutionaries dream during the day. They dream forward, and they do so together. Dreams about how to improve the world are daydreams brought about by strong hope. Night-dreams have no place for hope. They are usually dreams about wishes or fears. According to Freud, the function of dreams is to come to terms with past traumata. Night-dreams do not have a future dimension.

In the face of this unavoidable guilt, Arendt introduces ‘forgiveness’ into her argument. Forgiveness pardons the guilt inherent in action. It ensures that we can mutually acquit one another for the consequences of our actions. For Arendt, forgiveness is a ‘remedy’ for the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process set in train by action, for the fact that we cannot undo what we have done.27 Only the faculty of forgiveness can put us in a position to ‘remain free agents’: ‘only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new’.28 Forgiveness relates to the past by undoing what happened and thus creating free space for a new beginning. But we act into an uncertain future. This contingency, owed to the futurity within every act, forgiveness cannot control. The unreliability and inscrutability of the human heart creates a fog of uncertainty. The unforeseeability of the future is the context in which Arendt introduces the idea of the ‘promise’. Promises are ‘isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty’.29 They allow us ‘to dispose of the future as though it were the present’.30 A promise thus makes the future predictable and disposable. Arendt quotes Nietzsche, who referred to the ‘awareness of power and freedom’ gained by the one ‘who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he is strong enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even “in the fa...

Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth … must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man.35 The miracle that repeatedly interrupts the course of the world and saves it from ruin is, according to Arendt, the ‘fact of natality’, of ‘being born’. In this fact, ‘the faculty of action is ontologically rooted’. Only at this point does Arendt begin to speak of hope. The miracle is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope … It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’36 These are the rough outlines of Arendt’s theory of action. For her, hope is not an essential part of action. Humans can hope only because they can act. For action as such, hope is irrelevant. In this way, Arendt fails to acknowledge the primordial nature of hope, which transforms it into a driving force for action. In fact, hope precedes action, not vice versa. It is not action but hope that brings about miracles. It seems that the contemplative aspects internal to hope prevent Arendt from integrating hope into her theory of a...

Hannah Arendt

Hope presupposes an open future, which also implies unintended and unforeseeable events that cannot be controlled in advance. If we use the power of the promise to close down time altogether, that is, if we ‘dispose of the future as though it were the present’, hope becomes superfluous. 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. Arendt, however, claims that ‘the force of mutual promise’ is ultimately translated into the form of the ‘contract’.38 A contract is based not on trust or on a promise but on violence. Where there is absolute trust or an absolute promise, a contract is superfluous. A contract involves violence insofar as it threatens penalties or sanctions for its violation. We enter into a contract because we cannot trust. Trust excludes the possibility of violence. A law on which we agree also has a contractual character. It is precisely the threat of the use of violence that forces the partners entering into a contract to abide by it, and likewise to abide by a law. A contract radically removes the space of trust. We have to rely on trust because we cannot determine all relations between humans in legal terms. Trust facilitates social interaction.

The determination to act is inherent in the spirit of hope. Whoever hopes is inspired by the new, by the novum ultimum. Hope dares to take the leap towards a new life.

An ‘and yet’ is inherent in hope. It defies even absolute disaster. The star of hope is a neighbour of the unlucky star (Latin: des-astrum). Without the negativity of disaster and the defiant attitude of ‘and yet’, there is only the banality of optimism. In Ingeborg Bachmann, the negativity of hope is condensed into an ‘and yet’. Language and poetry, in particular, represent this ‘and yet’. As long as poets speak, there remains hope in the world:

Hope is a catalyst for writing. Poetry is a language of hope.

The tension between the impossible and the ‘and yet’, an act of faith, opens up the future, sustains language. An ‘and yet’ makes life possible.

Paradoxically, we reach solid ground when we face ruin. Being lost and not being forlorn strengthen each other:

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.

Absolute hope is an endless process. The imperial message does not arrive. It is this not-arriving that sustains hope. The endless building of the wall creates a stable community by uniting the whole people in the spirit of hope. The wall is not really for the protection of the people against external enemies. The suspicion is that the ‘people of the north’, against whom the wall is allegedly meant to protect the Chinese, do not actually exist: We have not seen them, and if we remain in our villages we shall never see them, even if on their wild horses they should ride as hard as they can straight toward us – the land is too vast and would not let them reach us, they would end their course in the empty air.52 If there are no enemies, what protection does the wall provide? The building of the wall strengthens the internal coherence of the community. In fact, it brings about the community in the genuine sense, the collective soul, the pageant of the people, in the first place. Absolute hope unites and allies the people:

Like eternally hopeful children they then said farewell to their homes; the desire once more to labor on the wall of the nation became irresistible. They set off earlier than they needed; half the village accompanied them for long distances… . Every fellow countryman was a brother for whom one was building a wall of protection … Unity! Unity! Shoulder to shoulder, a ring of brothers, a current of blood no longer confined within the narrow circulation of one body, but sweetly rolling and yet ever returning throughout the endless leagues of China.53

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.

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 …

Václav Havel,

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 its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.54

Václav Havel

We everywhere lose sight of what is distant. For this reason, we only have wishes. But we cannot hope. Without distance, there can be no nearness either. Nearness and distance condition each other. Nearness does not mean absence of distance. Distance is written into it. When distance disappears, nearness is lost, too. Nearness deepens distance.

Distance brings language close to poetry. In the information society, language loses all auratic distance and becomes shallow information. Digital hyper-communication makes us speechless. We thus live in a time without poetry. Someone who only consumes information no longer reads poems.

The intentionality of looking ahead and beyond was unknown to Heidegger. Back to the essence, to the past – that is the direction in which his thinking moves.