The Spirit of Hope

by Byung-Chul Han

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