"Since we are not from here, since we are only passing through, we are so made that there is every reason to hope."
The paradox of hope that you identify is of the same sort that runs through another word: "faith". To have faith is to believe without evidence, and to believe without evidence is itself a virtue because it's a show of faith. If God, or whatever it is you believe in, was either proven or falsified (impossible), that would be the end of faith, and thus the end of the virtue of faith because if God presented in some verifiable way, faith would not be required to believe, only rationality, hence the fait acompli.
Faith is to knowledge as hope is to utopia; the latter, coming into existence, snuffs out the former in both cases. They cannot exist simultaneously, and because living is an act of passing through, not arriving, there will always be faith in the unknown and hope for a better future. Knowledge and utopia are both end states that are aspired to unidirectionally, but are always on the horizon. In other words, complete knowledge and utopia cannot exist, because the transient nature of our existence cannot be escaped or altered.
Your instinct to "remain with both hands shut around an immense hope" is the very instinct to live, and to acknowledge what it means to be human. Because it's only through the temporary nature of our existence that meaning and value can be derived.
I can only hope that my reading did your piece justice. Absolutely phenomenal, Tamara! This is one of your best.
Faith without evidence as virtue rather than credulity opens onto something I’d like to chase. Consider how every tradition that verified itself promptly died of it. Oracles that delivered too plainly bred contempt; the gods who walked among mortals in Homer are the ones nobody quite worships anymore. Distance is what keeps reverence alive. The deity who stays offstage retains authority the visible one squanders. Concealment isn’t God’s limitation, it might be the condition of divinity as such.
There’s a further wrinkle the asymptote invites. If knowledge and utopia are approached forever and touched never, then the “rate” of approach starts to matter more than any arrival. A civilisation that convinces itself it’s nearly there behaves worse than one that knows the horizon recedes, the first will burn anything for the last mile that doesn’t exist. Better, maybe, to be openly unfinishable. Humility about the endpoint turns out to be a safety mechanism, not just an epistemic nicety.
I keep thinking the ancients had transience as the source of value rather than its enemy backwards and Homer, again, half-knew it. The gods envy mortals nothing except death, the one thing that makes a choice cost something, a love urgent, a courage real. Achilles matters because Achilles ends. An eternal Achilles is just boring. What we call the tragedy of finitude is closer to its dignity, wearing a grim mask.
Oh, Andrew, you handed me three doors I hadn’t noticed! I am so grateful.
Hope is one of those things that will forever be as much enigma as anticipation, and delusion, and hedging, and anticipation, and meaning, and precursor to disappointment. I think one’s own personal philosophy of hope is probably the most lucid mirror into their own temperament and prejudice.
There are those who, not completely unlike myself in some previous cases, view hope as indistinguishable from torture, particularly if one is doomed. There’s also the equation to a form of Pollyannaism; those who believe Hope is the province of, ironically, hopeless optimists.
Of course, there’s an internal contradiction afoot with these types, because the glaring problem is they continue to betray their fealty to hopelessness by continuing to live, often explaining away their hewing to life as a means of being some form of soothsayer (how convenient that everyone else should be the ones to completely abandon hope while they, themselves, live in the service of hoping to propagate hopelessness!)
Certainly, one can make the case that hope betrays a sort of wishful thinking through powerlessness as well; one is out of options for control over an outcome (or worse: never explored options to begin with), and so couch themselves in hoping for the outcome they desire. In a sense, you can say that it’s a sign of dedication. Of course, if the situation boils down to chance, say, you could stand to have your hopes dashed half the time, at least.
Hope is what keeps people going, to be sure. But for those who focus only on outcome (a position granted to those with the luxury of clear judgment due to not playing with potentially loaded dice), hope can be summarily nullified. After all: what difference does it make if you hope someone will get better when you have no agency over that?
Well, it can still be a sort of a salve, and it’s not purely superstition if it’s a possibility. It’s not like attributing boons to an unseen god or maleficence to an unseen adversary. Hoping for a positive outcome can be met with just that expectation. As long as that remains the case, it isn’t just a fool’s fancy.
I will say this: I am envious of anyone to whom another person can proffer hope. I think my entire life would be inverted the day anything like that ever happened to me (not saying I don’t have congenial or uplifting experiences; but hope is on another level entirely).
So, the person who lives in order to spread hopelessness doesn’t send us to despair for despair doesn’t proselytise. You describe someone who needs an audience for their refusal, which means the refusal is a performance, which means somewhere underneath it something is still hoping to be heard. Nobody argues that hard for the void unless part of them wants to be talked out of it.
Hoping someone recovers isn’t the same as praying to weather-gods because recovery is in the set of things that actually happen. The hope doesn’t cause anything,it tracks a real possibility, not a fabricated one, emphasising the difference between wishing and delusion, and it’s thinner than people admit but it’s there.
I understand the doomed-and-tortured position. When the outcome is fixed and bad, hope really does become a slow instrument of pain, Jigsaw understood this better than most philosophers. But even there, the object isn’t always the thing you name. You think you hope to survive, sometimes you actually hope that the time left means something. That one survives the death of the first hope and relocates.
The man who told me I gave him hope had no idea he was doing it, and I had no plan to. It wasn’t offered, only noticed, after, and I believe the thing can’t be sought head-on since it arrives sideways, for people not watching the door. Are you watching the door very closely, Ian?
Thank you for this, you took my essay somewhere else, but I’m glad!
After the door fails to crack open - even if you leave it ajar - it falls without your scope of vital or temporal experience after a while, and I think if I’d heard it creak at this point, I’d probably die of a heart attack anyway. In which case, I almost hope - ha, ha - that it doesn’t happen. 🙃
My gleaning from what you were driving at was physical, tangible possibility as a repudiation of the prospect that hope is just another form of superstition or folly. I don’t believe that, even if it’s expedient to my reputation as a curmudgeonly eremite to do so, but I wouldn’t be averse to disappointing anyone who rooted for such a character anyhow.
I think those who traffic in hopelessness are largely some amalgam of sore, weakened, spurned, or possibly mentally ill. All of these are innocent until internalized and propagated. Of course, try and tell a self-avowed hopeless person that their rendition of hopelessness is tantamount to a purpose, and you’re sure to be met with some form of chagrin, probably of a decidedly immature stripe.
I do not promulgate from upon the mount. I know because I was there. And I feel the grip of bony fingers trying to pull me back more often than I care to acknowledge.
The bony fingers, still pulling… I trust the ongoing grip more than any clean recovery arc; the tidy ones usually lie about something.
I see the cruelty in the timing you sketch. The thing might arrive once you've rebuilt your whole life around its absence, and then what, the creak as coronary event? But the terrifying door and the failed door hang on the same hinge. You've learned to stand near it regardless and it looks like nothing from outside. It's the entire matter!
This was a most-engaging essay -- and I admit that much of my engagement was counter-argumentative -- in a dialectic sense. The evils that fought each other to get out of the box are arrogant and self-centered. Hope is neither of those, so of course it did not get out before them. So are we to think of hope: humble and open to people and other possibilities. The "Saw" films underscore this: in their desperation to survive people engage in self-mutilation and are willing to do anything to another -- utterly self-centered in the most primitive animal sense and incapable of the hope you describe as an attitude without specific object.
What Kant and Hegel and DesCartes and Francis Fukuyama ("The End of History") mistake is that there is no perpetual motion machine. What they see -- and they have created the zeitgeist -- is a perpetual motion machine that just makes things better for humanity; but this engine of progress does not create its own future. No: it chews up the physical world, destroys people, and animals and even single-celled organisms all without thought. It rests in patriarchy, and racism (else why are all the poorest people those of color?)
It is this absolutism that is as dangerous as any thought of Stalin or Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler. For when you know the future will be utopia AND you know the content of that utopia, any sacrifice is worth it -- though it goes unsaid that the sacrifices will be born almost entirely by the powerless who would benefit most from utopia. Thus, I submit tautology than teleology to find the future in the present which is not logical at all but basic solipsism.
To apprehend beauty in any form, to be moved emotionally, to sigh in contentment..., we can experience these as gifts and cannot find them no matter where we search. If I approach a painting with any expectation -- even of being moved in some way -- that pre-condition will prevent from seeing the painting as it exists for my mind and soul.
The un-hoped thing, as you suggest, is an attitude open to but not expecting grace. It is that recognition of grace that your open comment recognizes. To be "given hope" means an inspiration that the un-hoped thing may come to pass -- and we are far more likely to recognize is open and not expecting something else.
I am glad your reading of the jar corrects mine, the evils escaped first because velocity is native to arrogance. Hope lagged because humility does not lunge. Elpis remaining inside was never the consolation the myth pretends. She stays with us, yes, but her staying is also a form of captivity. What sustains us is also what we cannot fully release into the world. That ambivalence is honest.
I love the perpetual motion machine, a device that manufactures betterment while consuming the very substrate it runs on, pretending the fuel is free. Teleology has always been generous with other people’s sacrifices. The utopia is deferred; the bill is not, and it arrives, unfailingly, at the addresses the least able to pay it. When the endpoint is both known and non-negotiable, cruelty rebrands itself as arithmetic. Stalin balanced those books. So did Pol Pot.
To locate the future in the present and then call it “discovery” is to smuggle your conclusion into your premise and congratulate yourself on the arrival. Solipsism dressed as historical law. The system proves only that it was built to prove itself.
sure, expectation is a screen, not a lens, it forecloses the encounter. Grace, if we can bear the word without its incense, refuses to answer a summons, coming to those already turned slightly away, attending to nothing in particular, which returns us to being “given” hope, and why it can never be requested: the moment you ask, you’ve installed the expectation that guarantees its absence.
Thank you for arguing with me, JP, in the most incredible way! This is the reading I want the most.
If I may, arguments are counter-propositions, and you have elegantly refined mine -- to the point of synthesis that is mutual.
Screen vs lens, cruelty hides within arithmetic, the dishonesty of "discovery" in logical positivism.
Engaging with you, Tamara, is ever an enlightening delight. My arguments with Hegel and other idealists are less rewarding and I am not at all charitable. Indeed, a character in a novel I'm writing says: "Reading Hegel is about as interesting in the moment and ultimately soul draining as heroin. Or so the analogy comes to me."
Synthesis that's mutual is the only one worth reaching. Your character on Hegel made me snort. The heroin analogy is crueler and truer than most published criticism, the momentary rush, the long depletion, the diminishing returns that keep you turning pages anyway. Put that line somewhere prominent. Hegel earned it, and your novel will profit. Fabulous, JP!
I’ve seen it many times in my gallery, a collector stands before a canvas that resists them. They can’t grasp the narrative, they feel uncomfortable and their posture changes. They suddenly start waiting for meaning and that’s the closest lived analogue I know to what you've done with your essay, distinguishing hope-as-demand from hope-as-availability.
From Epictetus to Bloch to Kant your argument resolves a real tension. I’ve noticed that most essays on hope either moralize toward optimism or collapse into fashionable despair. But you built a ladder.
Consider why unfinished works like Michelangelo's “Prisoners”, straining half-formed out of raw marble, often move us more than the finished David. A completed sculpture answers a question. An unfinished one keeps one open. Bloch's "not-yet" is structurally identical, the “Prisoners” are utopia in stone, hope with no fixed terminus, only direction. Collectors buy them because they refuse a sort of closure they are seeking, and that refusal feels more honest than certainty.
I believe this is pragmatically useful beyond aesthetics too. Any dealer, curator, or gallerist who's survived a market crash knows the difference between speculating on what a piece "will be worth" (fragile, disappointment-prone hope) and simply staying in the room, attentive, ready for whatever unexpected work or buyer or shift arrives next (espérance, functionally). The latter is what actually sustains people through bad years.
You never perform in your writing, Tamara, and I admire that about you. The “unhoped-for” as a name for what exceeds expectation, what a brilliant phrase!
The “Prisoners” undo the lazy assumption that incompletion is privation. But those figures aren't thwarted “Davids”; the non-finito is constitutive. Release them from the marble and you abolish the torsion that arrests us. The gap IS the content, Bloch's “Noch-Nicht” made lapidary, the not-yet you can lay a palm against.
Staying in the room wears the aspect of idleness while being its antipode, exacting vigil, disguised as a man standing still.
Thank you for the stone, Alexander, your comments are art!
Your musing about the movement of unfinished works is food for thought, Alexander. I actually hadn’t thought of it that way. A completed work, like a completed task or vision, leaves much less to the imagination.
In similar vein, a completed task or scenario or one that has a definitive outcome leaves no room for hope or for alternatives or variation or imagination or what have you. Forgive me if I’m losing the point, but it seems like what you’re trying to get across.
Completion forecloses, incompletion invites. That's really the whole ethics of hope in miniature, to finish a thing is to fix its meaning, to leave it open is to let others still participate in becoming. Maybe that's why her essay ends "still turned toward a world that hasn't finished with its surprises", she refused her own closure on purpose.
I hadn’t noticed that, either. I’m actually not very well attuned to subtext. Or anything else, for that matter. Can’t say I’m not working on it, but I can tell if your G and B guitar strings aren’t tuned to the proper interval. That might count for something. 🙃
It counts for a great deal, that's perfect pitch for dissonance. You hear when something's off before you can say why. That's not so different from writing a piece that senses, structurally, when an idea has resolved too neatly and needs another turn. I think you’re more attuned than you're giving yourself credit for.
And suddenly you make Kant feel like a text from someone you have a crush on, vague, maddening, stunning and somehow worth waiting by the phone for. Tamara, you've made philosophy cool again, which is basically a miracle on the order of making dial-up sound romantic.
Modern hope is procrastination. "I'll deal with it later" is despair. "It'll work out" is hope. While l'espérance is optimism that finally learned PR.
I can’t add anything else to this formidable essay.
I laughed at espérance as optimism that finally hired a publicist. Though… optimism does PR for a product that may not exist. Espérance skips the product entirely and just keeps the lights on. Same department, different job description. And the crush-text reading of Kant is dangerously accurate. Maddening was the method, I think.
Thank you, dear Céline, you made me laugh and think in the same breath!
Through what lens do we witness hope today? The lens closest at hand to me has recently revealed something alarming:
I have lately been witness to a rising class of people the likes of which has not been seen since the days of some god-forsaken war or plague that overstayed its welcome, the weary class. Burdened souls withered by the unrelenting onslaught of the present, the flash flood of too much. Too much everything, too much life. A bewildered people, caught up in the wash cycle of a persistent precarity of purpose. A sentenced people with the weight of judgment passed on them, not of justice, but caprice. Clothed in an undefined defeat, dispirited, they are weary of a blame that swoops in on them from the circling uncertainties laying siege to their sense of hope. Hopeless, they bear the pressure of an original sin never committed, yet felt to the bone.
These weary ones cluster in their families, their friend groups, their colleague and peer communities, unaware of their mutual weariness, each wearing a specific weariness in their own waried sense of isolation. Lost in a presence of the past with no beachhead on Future's frontier shores. Yet, as a class, they are everywhere; and the cumulative depth of their despair is remarkable. The tell is not a particular posture or a given gait. It is in the eyes that reflect the fierce freedom that blows through their world. A wild wind wreaking havoc in an avalanche of choice, a despair of accountability, a blind faith in something missing. An unaddressed grief of hopelessness is the signature profile.
It is not just those broken bodies found on the park benches or sidewalk stoops lying listlessly under their cardboard shelters; it’s the everyday employee shuffling into their fast food/fast clothes service job a half-inch smaller than yesterday and leaving eight hours later a half-inch smaller still, it’s the gig worker performing for tips with a smile and a black well of emptiness behind their colorless pupils, it’s the small-town farmer drained of small-town pride like a reservoir dried to cracking, stripped of the ancient source of that pride, self-reliance stirred with a spoonful of hope.
I witness despair among unimaginable abundance, prosperity within a deathly desperation.
What is hope, truly, but a living cell dividing into two. Non-telelogical growth. Hope is a maturation process abstracted, life giving volition to sun rays, literally. Why then does hopelessness flood our modern landscapes? The paradox of rational individualism itself is one invasive species. Carried to its logical extreme, it lands in a politics of severe inequality, the shame of personal responsibility within a context of social dynamism and containment, and a world of futures compressed into a singular form of growth, exponential progress that scales beyond human capacity.
St. Paul might have said it best when he identified the highest three human qualities: faith, hope, and charity. Of these, he said, hope is the greatest; or did he?
Hope’s collapse is not evenly distributed, and it wears the mask of prosperity. The weary class suffers a peculiarly modern affliction, indicted without a crime, sentenced by contingency. I like rhat inversion of original sin, older theology at least offered absolution, this one withholds even the charge, so there’s nothing to confess and no one to confess to.
I’d name the mechanism differently than you do. That fierce freedom blowing through their eyes is the terminus of the rationalist overreach I traced, the promise that the future is plottable, ours to engineer. When that promise hardens into a demand and the arrival never comes, the individual is left holding a debt that was never theirs to incur. Progress privatised its failures, hence the shame, the residue of a collective myth billed to a single account.
Hope as mitosis, volition without terminus, growth that doesn’t know where it’s headed and doesn’t need to = Bloch’s “not-yet” rendered biological, demolishing the objection that hope requires an object. The dividing cell hopes for nothing. It simply continues.
As for Paul, what a lovely trap you set. He ranked “charity” the highest, not hope. But I think your slip is the truer reading. Charity is what hope looks like once it starts spending itself on someone else’s future . Perhaps that’s the only exit from the weary class: hope turns bearable when it’s no longer yours.
Thank you for this, Andrew, you turned an abstraction into a census!
The final hope lies in this truth: whatever barbarism, whatever atrocities, conjured up and between men, no devastation upon the earth will ever cast a shadow across the sun. No breath of corruption, as Dostoevski calls the stinch of death rising out of decaing flesh, will kiss the heavens. All consequence is limited to the actors upon the stage. The celestial audience remains unaffected, even if briefly entertained by the horror film unfolding on the tiny blue dot.
An essay that thinks with its citations instead of hiding behind them, moving from Epictetus to Jigsaw without ever losing its own voice. Tamara, the supernova!
Hope may be less a belief about the future than a “tense” the self borrows to stay habitable. Grief, similarly, is the mind's forced conjugation into a past that won't resolve. Bloch's "not-yet" is grammar. To hope is to refuse the present indicative as the only available mood, insisting on the subjunctive, not what is, but what might be if the world consented. Hope is syntax before it's sentiment.
Hope as the subjunctive mood, the linguist in me is pleased. It reframes the whole quarrel. The Stoics were counseling us to stay in the indicative, to inhabit only what is. And grief as forced conjugation into an unresolving past is almost unbearably right; mourning really does feel like being declined, grammatically, against your will.
Bur the subjunctive isn't a mood we choose, some languages barely have one. Perhaps despair is just a tongue that lost the conjugation?
Wow, Tamara. Another one of my favorite pieces of yours.
This one took me back to a cherished part of myself- the days as a college scholar reading and writing critical essays like this for my Religious Studies degree. This writing is well-crafted, percolating philosophically, and will linger long into the night as many of your best pieces do…
On a more personal note, this piece also resonated quite deeply (of course ✨). In the years of purging many of my favorite gifts and sentiments left behind from a significant partnership I have spoken of here in comments before, the last item standing- which from time to time I find stored in the way back of a closet, is a framed black and white ink line drawing of a landscape, in which he so beautifully incorporated the word “HOPE” stretching across a wide canyon. It’s such a simple piece, but one of my favorite items I own. Even in my best efforts, I don’t believe I’ll ever part with it.
This essay helped me remember why, in a way I hadn’t considered. Thank you. ✨
I am so grateful when you share glimpses of your life, Lucy, it is always inspirational under one form or another, and in this case I can frankly say that outliving every other gift from that partnership was never really about him, or not only. You’ve kept the word, not the giver. HOPE stretched across a canyon, the image already contains its argument for a canyon is the gap you can’t cross only by wishing, and the word spans it anyway without pretending the drop isn’t there.
There’s alwyas a reason the sentimental gifts purge easily and this one wouldn’t go. The others said “remember” us.This one says something that started pointing forward, at that canyon still in front of you, at whatever hasn’t crossed yet. I do believe it’s easier to release a keepsake than to throw away a live instruction.
The unhoped-for, a notion so dear to me that I wanted people to understand and spread forward, doesn’t stay on display. You need to wait for it
I am so enchanted my essay returned you to the college scholar too. I have to thank you again for trusting my comment section!
I was once told a sentence by a Chan and Tantric Master "Hope is the little sister of fear" .
When reading the first part of your essay it returned. Because if one looks closer- and as you wrote for example this:
"To hope to grow rich, to keep one’s health, to recover from illness, or to make one’s happiness hang on winning a good reputation, is thus to mark oneself out as fortune’s prey, for we have no control over wealth, over health, or over renown." - as long as hope has an object, it is often born from the fear of the opposite happening.
We hope to recover from illness, because we fear that we are not. We hope to stay healthy, because we fear to get sick. I hope that my dog does not step on a bee, because I fear he does and gets another allergic shock which may kill him. This wish to control is linked to fear too.
So that kind of hope, the "classic hope" at its origin- is fear.
What you described later feels different to me and I would not use the word hope, but as you offered- maybe openness. A presence kind of saying "when nothing is sure, everything is possible" . This does not need certainty, it neither needs knowledge and it may even embrace our natural capacity of fear, consciously experienced and then maybe in the possibilty of being a motor to act when necessary or to receive or to become creative despite all odds.
I read your comment and I had the feeling I was in conversation with Frank Herbert, over tea speaking about his fear, his “Litany Against Fear” ringing in my ears like a mantra: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." Because your master’s line seems true to me: object-hope and fear are the same current running two directions. I hope for X BECAUSE I fear not-X, the two cut from one cloth, and the fabric is the wish to control an outcome that was never mine. I see your point clearly! Your dog and the bee represent the mechanism in miniature (by the way, I share the same fear about my dog since 2023 when he stepped on some kind of Asian wasp in Marbella, but I digress). The hope is precisely fear-shaped. It has the exact contour of the dread it tries to answer, which means, chased far enough, hope-with-an-object IS the fear, wearing the one mask that makes it bearable to hold. Quite insidious I would say and terrifying
That reframes the Stoic suspicion beautifully. They warned that hope makes us fortune’s prey, but your master locates WHY: because such hope is already fear, and fear is the state of being owned by what you can’t control, whether we are control freaks or just normal people. To hope for the outcome is to have conceded that you’re afraid of its absence. The two feelings share a single account and fortune holds the passbook.
I will agree with you because you want to resist the word for the other thing, I felt the strain of using one term for both, which is why I reached for the refined French term, “l’espérance”, but even that keeps the root. Maybe “openness” is cleaner because it drops the etymology? I guess it’s better since what you describe doesn’t answer fear by promising the good outcome. Instead it lets the fear stay, fully felt, no longer needing to be converted into its hopeful disguise. “When nothing is sure, everything is possible” works only if you’ve stopped demanding a particular result, meaning you’ve stopped fearing its opposite, meaning the fear can finally be what it is instead of pretending it’s hope.
Then fear as a possible motor consciously held sharpens not paralyses and can tip into action or reception or the odd creative leap you make BECAUSE the odds are bad, not despite having talked yourself out of dreading them. That’s a maturity I am aspiring to, hoping (yeah, hoping :) to reach some day. I don’t think I’m there yet
Thank you for the master’s sentence, Karin, and for holding the fear in the open, I’ve surely missed your comments here!
" I hope for X BECAUSE I fear not-X, the two cut from one cloth, and the fabric is the wish to control an outcome that was never mine." Exactly! Perfectly put in one sentence, as I never could. I am sorry to hear that to your dog happened the same, it is our second summer with this "alert" always in the mind, but actually it shows up as a sort of tension in the body. When I walk, fear is always present. Of course I say " I hope he doesn't step on a bee, a wasp or mistakes one of those for a fly and tries to snap for it", but knowing that it is fear speaking and being felt within.
I don't know how mature or not I am in that regards, but as fearing whatsoever was especially in my younger years a constant companion which led to not doing fun things for example because they could go bad, I started to investigate. To not look away. To not disguise. But to hold it. Because I was fearing so much and even quite ridiculous things (Watching my boyfriend at that time wakeboarding, wanting to do it but fearing that I could loose my bikini through the force....), I needed to learn to face and feel it directly. That lead to that I dared to do and try out new things, dared to be at risk to fail or feel hurt, dared to be not loved for standing my ground and so on. The confrontation with fear, sparked curiosity and wonder. And too, that this natural energy is crucial when it comes to immediate action. No need to fear fear.
What came to mind too, that this fear-hope couple are as you pointed out a product of the mind. It is different than an immediate activation of the body to an actual threat. Nevertheless the response or what is going on in the body, is the same.
Your essays are at the moment the only ones I read, though sometimes with delay.
The mind’s fear-hope couple /vs/ the body’s immediate activation to a real threat represent the same physiology, entirely different source. The bee on the walk is anticipatory, a story the mind runs forward, the actual snake underfoot needs no story, and Learning to tell them apart might be the whole of the work because the first can be held and questioned while the second should just be obeyed.No need to fear fear. That’s further than most philosophers get.
Very early on you wrote, "I want to grab hope with my hands and not let it go." I applaud that thought, because I also believe you are one of those people who don't simply hope, you take whatever actions you think will help and make a difference, and then covered with sweat, streaked with dirt, and exhausted (all of it metaphorically or otherwise), then you hope.
A lot of the arguments from the Stoics and others assume that those who hope don't also act - "to be reduced to hoping, by contrast, is to have very little control over how events will unfold..." The reality is that even the person who "undertakes something" has no real control over the outcome either. Things happen - natural disasters, personal disasters (the Silicon Valley guy who was brilliant and doing incredible things tripped on his treadmill, fell, and died), accidents. Those things can blow up the best laid plans and their execution.
I also think about hope and remember doing what I was able to do to support the candidate I wanted to win. Some years it wasn't much, some years it was a lot. In the end, I sat there on election night, hoping my candidate would win, having done all I could, and knowing it wasn't in my control.
Your definition of l'espérance is the key for me to this entire essay: "a free and disinterested availability that leaves us open to whatever." I move forward, I recognise what doesn't work in the present, I do what I am able to do, and I hope. The hope is not the least of it. There are times, the hope is what gives me the strength to get up the next morning regardless of what happens, because successful or not, I still need to get up and keep going.
The Stoics treat acting and hoping as rivals at opposite ends of a control spectrum. But your treadmill man settles it, the one who undertakes has no more grip on the outcome than the one who waits. Control was always a story told about the front of an action, never the back.
So the honest sequence is yours: do the whole of what's yours, then hope the rest! Consecutive, not opposed.
Hope as what gets you vertical the next morning, win or lose. A permit to continue. A fabulous one Thank you, Doc!
Those who hope,” Byung-Chul Han’s writes, “put their trust in possibilities that point beyond the ‘badly existing.’ Hope enables us to break out of closed time as a prison.” Hope challenges the sense that we are on an irreversible course toward a certain end. For hope, the future is not a runaway train on a fixed track. There might be a way that we’ll come out of this OK.
This kind of hope grants a certain patience about the future, but it also allows one to act, sustaining the day-to-day in a richer way, seeking and pursuing remedies for the problems plaguing us. Unlike frenetic busyness, unlike the compulsive achievement-seeking that Han has diagnosed so trenchantly in earlier books like The Burnout Society, hopeful actions are more deliberate and decisive, more attuned to the world beyond the ego. “Those who act with hope,” Han explains, “act audaciously and are not distracted by the rapidity and toughness of life. However, there is also something contemplative about hope. It leans forward and listens attentively. The receptivity of hope makes it tender, lends it beauty and grace.” Hope is future-oriented, but it is so in a way that illuminates, that gives us back, the present: “To the hopeful, the world appears in a different light. Hope gives the world a special radiance; it brightens the world.”
Han insists that hope ultimately gathers others into a community. Hope is a rallying cry. It can galvanize. Hope not only transcends what we know for certain, but it also transcends the limits of what I can control or accomplish on my own. One of the best chapters in The Spirit of Hope challenges the existentialism of Albert Camus, who expresses a common notion (at least from the twentieth century onward) that hope is weak, static, resigned. Han rejects this as a specious account. Camus’s charges might stick to an everything-will-turn-out-fine optimism, but hope “ensures that, despite all the ills of the world, we do not resign ourselves.” Han frequently draws on the very different existentialism of Camus’s older contemporary Gabriel Marcel, who during the dark days of World War II gave a profound talk on the need for a resilient, open sense of hope. (Han notes that Camus himself strikes more hopeful notes about hope in his Nobel acceptance speech.) For Han, as for Marcel before him, hope is the truly tough-minded and courageous disposition, yet it is also caring and graceful. It encourages “solicitude that lovingly and affectionately turns towards others, that takes care of them.” It is “friendly,” to use one of Han’s favorite words. It draws people together in solidarity. It draws them into a “we.”
Even my beloved Emil Cioran says that it’s impossible live without hope.
Han’s phrase is the reinforcement. Closed time is the prison Kant and Hegel built when they mapped history to its terminus: a future fully known is one already served, a sentence without parole. Hope pries the lid.
And I savour our Cioran conceding hope’s necessity. The great insomniac of despair, admitting the thing can’t be lived without. When even he keeps a candle lit, the argument is essentially over.
I love how you connected “Saw” to a description of the 20th century.
“Hope” is a very weighty word. Throughout my reading, I kept ticking off words in my head a beat before I encountered them in your essay: waiting, expectation, projection, passivity, disappointment, admission of failure, belief, illusion, desire, uncertainty, consolation, faith, utopia, aspiration…
Despite the word having such versatility, I find myself stuck with my original definition of hope: waiting as a substitute for agency and expecting something entirely out of my control.
Your later turn toward “the unhoped-for” seems like the opposite, which I like better.
The openness of “the unhoped-for” feels like the “maybe yes, maybe no” equanimity of the Chinese Farmer.
It feels like the openness of faith, in the sense of simply being the absence of doubt.
Whether “the unhoped-for” is the new hope, or openness, presence, posture, or readiness, I don’t know which word to pick.
My simple mind is spiraling into mental word salad.
Eenie, meenie, miny… okay, “open presence.”
I’m going to go with open presence.
You didn’t say exactly, but that sounds like the gift you gave the man you loved.
Those words cluster around hope because they’re all symptoms of one condition: leaning toward what you can’t command. You had the shape and were waiting for the labels.
“Open presence” is a better pick than the raffle suggests. It drops the forward-tilt hope can’t shake, keeps the availability.
And yes, your last line is right :) Not a gift I gave him but a capacity he recovered near me, and mistook for a gift…
very well written and the art chosen is fascinating. it is time to assemble some of your material for a book....essays and poems and media mixed together into a product to read and cherish as a consumer (it helps the economy !)
A part of me believes these essays are dated at the root, they carry the temperature of the week they were written, and a book asks them to stand outside their moment. Some survive that. Some are really letters, and a letter under glass stops being a letter. But the mixed-form instinct tempts me — essays, poems, artwork braided rather than filed in separate drawers. That weave might hold.
Thank you, ron, for wanting it bound! It means a lot to me.
A lot of your writing is more timeless than you may realize. I have to believe you (or your "team") spend quite an effort in selecting images, figuring out spacing and pace for a post, finding the right "face page" and caption. A book is just one more side hustle, there is a need to monetize art for our economy (gives others a reason to promote your work ! ) as you know with Substack ...... thank you for sharing your creativity through Substack.
Tamara, having now read, rather than merely listened to, your essay, with its distracting foibles of pronunciation, I understand a little better what you mean by what I might describe as different kinds of hope.
Openness to future experiences, without trying to overplan in order to be certain of them, is largely why I travel. It opens one to unexpected possibilities. Bonne chance!
Yet I know people who wouldn’t dare travel without a firm itinerary in space & time. I can think of one friend for whom what I might call “freestyle travel”, is anathema. Is this cowardice? Does this help explain why some people have eg, closed minds, & live their lives according to ritualised behaviours? To overplan is to lead to inevitable disappointment, as delayed flights, illness, injury, weather etc are almost bound to affect plans. On the other hand, of course detailed planning is necessary for travel to extreme destinations, undersea & space travel being among them.
As with travel, when I used to go eg clubbing often, it was always to enhance my exposure to the adventure of the unplanned & the unexpected, although dancing & meeting people were my main initial motivators to go.
I’d like to think that my approach to life, epitomised in travel, is the more courageous than the overplanned journey.
I like that you took the time to revisit my essay with a different mind. In the end, it’s the biggest compliment for any writer. I agree that travel is the cleanest possible demonstration of the distinction, so I guess it’s fitting you found my essay in that space rather than in the philosophy. I see the over-planned itinerary as a sort of fortress built against uncertainty, and like every fortress it keeps out the raid AND the gift.But I’d hesitate before calling your friend a coward, and I think you half-hesitate too. Maybe I’m wrong and you don’t have to answer it or come with more details. It’s just my intuition whispering. What looks like cowardice seems often a different form of fear, for the freestyle traveller can tolerate not knowing what tomorrow holds while the planner tolerates the labour of control better than the vertigo of openness. Neither is braver in the abstract, that’s the paradox. You’ve discovered the unplanned rewards you, and reward teaches courage faster than any principle. Your nerve was earned trip by trip.
Your own caveat is the wise part! Freestyle works for the wander. The seabed and orbit demand the checklist…. there the unexpected doesn’t hand you an adventure, you find a corpse instead, suggesting the real skill is knowing which the terrain requires, I mean loose in the city that surprises, rigid where surprise is fatal. Espérance refers to carrying a map that is lightly enough to be abandoned when a better street appears, and gripping it hard when the street could kill you. It sounds simple, well… it is simple. I have applied that my whole life
So… you can go for the dancing and stay for whoever the night produces. Fun! That’s the whole disposition in miniature, sweatier than Kant but identical underneath :)) even more fun!
One day we should go clubbing together as part of the Museguided salon! :)
It should read “But I’ve not SOLD my dancing shoes”!
And as for dancing, I, like all lovers of dancing, with the right music & company, can dance for hours. It could be a great night before the second & final day of an extended salon, if you think two days is not too long. Perhaps the second day could be a walking discussion, in the Aristotelian tradition, but sur le pont.
I do “half-hesitate”. On numerous occasions during geology field work & bushwalking, I’ve taken the safer route. It’s an instinctive response to sensing danger. All my family do it: no free climbers amongst us. So I’ve sold my bicycles, skis & diving equipment.
And I do very much plan trips, but loosely, not intricately. I like to allow a week in a place, arriving say Thursday, leaving on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, allowing those free days for contingency: illness, injury, bad weather, meeting someone!
But I’ve not my dancing shoes. On a night when my youthful vigour holds out, dancing would be a fantastic thing, post dinner. Whether here in the antipodes, or next year when I plan to come over, in say Paris, London or elsewhere. I had a memorable time in Avignon years ago. Great little restaurants & clubs.
The typo corrects into something better than the original, keeping the dancing shoes is the whole disposition in one image. Dancing is the risk that only ever hands you the good surprise. And the buffer days are the truest espérance in your comment. Not no plan, but a plan with deliberate slack cut into it, margins where illness or a stranger can arrive. You've engineered room for the unengineered.
My issue with stoicism, or at least the version most commonly espoused, is that it presumes a lot more control over the mind than we actually have. We can spend years trying to turn our mind into a manicured garden and get very close for long spells, but ultimately fail.
I am mildly surprised you didn't sneak in any Heidegger in... I feel like hope is tied in to the fact that our being is an issue for us. I suppose hope doesn't have to signify the present is problematic ..
Stoicism oversells itself in the manicured-garden point, treating the mind as a plot you can weed into permanent order, when in practice the weeds return the moment you look away. Marcus Aurelius wrote the same consolations to himself over and over, which rather gives the game away. If the garden held, he'd have needed the note once.
Hahah, yes I dodged Heidegger! “Being an issue for itself” is arguably the ground my essay stands on. Care already leans forward. I flinched from the vocabulary, not the thought. Thank you so much for this!
What a splendid tour with philosopher companions! For me, hope is living with openness to possibility. Not a closed system or certainty of teleological direction, but a willingness to engage the surprising universe with all its organic changes. Hope is a group project, with long vision. Hope is not wishing but engaging. Thanks for your thorough essay.
“Hope is not wishing but engaging” is the line that separates the two camps. Wishing keeps its hands folded; engaging gets them dirty. And "group project with long vision" disposes of the lone hoper waiting for rescue, the surprising universe answers participation, not petition.
Thank you, Hans, for travelling the whole route with me!
"Since we are not from here, since we are only passing through, we are so made that there is every reason to hope."
The paradox of hope that you identify is of the same sort that runs through another word: "faith". To have faith is to believe without evidence, and to believe without evidence is itself a virtue because it's a show of faith. If God, or whatever it is you believe in, was either proven or falsified (impossible), that would be the end of faith, and thus the end of the virtue of faith because if God presented in some verifiable way, faith would not be required to believe, only rationality, hence the fait acompli.
Faith is to knowledge as hope is to utopia; the latter, coming into existence, snuffs out the former in both cases. They cannot exist simultaneously, and because living is an act of passing through, not arriving, there will always be faith in the unknown and hope for a better future. Knowledge and utopia are both end states that are aspired to unidirectionally, but are always on the horizon. In other words, complete knowledge and utopia cannot exist, because the transient nature of our existence cannot be escaped or altered.
Your instinct to "remain with both hands shut around an immense hope" is the very instinct to live, and to acknowledge what it means to be human. Because it's only through the temporary nature of our existence that meaning and value can be derived.
I can only hope that my reading did your piece justice. Absolutely phenomenal, Tamara! This is one of your best.
Faith without evidence as virtue rather than credulity opens onto something I’d like to chase. Consider how every tradition that verified itself promptly died of it. Oracles that delivered too plainly bred contempt; the gods who walked among mortals in Homer are the ones nobody quite worships anymore. Distance is what keeps reverence alive. The deity who stays offstage retains authority the visible one squanders. Concealment isn’t God’s limitation, it might be the condition of divinity as such.
There’s a further wrinkle the asymptote invites. If knowledge and utopia are approached forever and touched never, then the “rate” of approach starts to matter more than any arrival. A civilisation that convinces itself it’s nearly there behaves worse than one that knows the horizon recedes, the first will burn anything for the last mile that doesn’t exist. Better, maybe, to be openly unfinishable. Humility about the endpoint turns out to be a safety mechanism, not just an epistemic nicety.
I keep thinking the ancients had transience as the source of value rather than its enemy backwards and Homer, again, half-knew it. The gods envy mortals nothing except death, the one thing that makes a choice cost something, a love urgent, a courage real. Achilles matters because Achilles ends. An eternal Achilles is just boring. What we call the tragedy of finitude is closer to its dignity, wearing a grim mask.
Oh, Andrew, you handed me three doors I hadn’t noticed! I am so grateful.
My favourite saying along these lines is: “Faith and reason are not opposed. Faith builds on reason, and extends beyond it.”
Like a constant yearning for more, leaning into the infinite, not to attain a prize, but because of the inherent value of the pursuit itself. ☺️
Precisley that!
Hope is one of those things that will forever be as much enigma as anticipation, and delusion, and hedging, and anticipation, and meaning, and precursor to disappointment. I think one’s own personal philosophy of hope is probably the most lucid mirror into their own temperament and prejudice.
There are those who, not completely unlike myself in some previous cases, view hope as indistinguishable from torture, particularly if one is doomed. There’s also the equation to a form of Pollyannaism; those who believe Hope is the province of, ironically, hopeless optimists.
Of course, there’s an internal contradiction afoot with these types, because the glaring problem is they continue to betray their fealty to hopelessness by continuing to live, often explaining away their hewing to life as a means of being some form of soothsayer (how convenient that everyone else should be the ones to completely abandon hope while they, themselves, live in the service of hoping to propagate hopelessness!)
Certainly, one can make the case that hope betrays a sort of wishful thinking through powerlessness as well; one is out of options for control over an outcome (or worse: never explored options to begin with), and so couch themselves in hoping for the outcome they desire. In a sense, you can say that it’s a sign of dedication. Of course, if the situation boils down to chance, say, you could stand to have your hopes dashed half the time, at least.
Hope is what keeps people going, to be sure. But for those who focus only on outcome (a position granted to those with the luxury of clear judgment due to not playing with potentially loaded dice), hope can be summarily nullified. After all: what difference does it make if you hope someone will get better when you have no agency over that?
Well, it can still be a sort of a salve, and it’s not purely superstition if it’s a possibility. It’s not like attributing boons to an unseen god or maleficence to an unseen adversary. Hoping for a positive outcome can be met with just that expectation. As long as that remains the case, it isn’t just a fool’s fancy.
I will say this: I am envious of anyone to whom another person can proffer hope. I think my entire life would be inverted the day anything like that ever happened to me (not saying I don’t have congenial or uplifting experiences; but hope is on another level entirely).
So, the person who lives in order to spread hopelessness doesn’t send us to despair for despair doesn’t proselytise. You describe someone who needs an audience for their refusal, which means the refusal is a performance, which means somewhere underneath it something is still hoping to be heard. Nobody argues that hard for the void unless part of them wants to be talked out of it.
Hoping someone recovers isn’t the same as praying to weather-gods because recovery is in the set of things that actually happen. The hope doesn’t cause anything,it tracks a real possibility, not a fabricated one, emphasising the difference between wishing and delusion, and it’s thinner than people admit but it’s there.
I understand the doomed-and-tortured position. When the outcome is fixed and bad, hope really does become a slow instrument of pain, Jigsaw understood this better than most philosophers. But even there, the object isn’t always the thing you name. You think you hope to survive, sometimes you actually hope that the time left means something. That one survives the death of the first hope and relocates.
The man who told me I gave him hope had no idea he was doing it, and I had no plan to. It wasn’t offered, only noticed, after, and I believe the thing can’t be sought head-on since it arrives sideways, for people not watching the door. Are you watching the door very closely, Ian?
Thank you for this, you took my essay somewhere else, but I’m glad!
After the door fails to crack open - even if you leave it ajar - it falls without your scope of vital or temporal experience after a while, and I think if I’d heard it creak at this point, I’d probably die of a heart attack anyway. In which case, I almost hope - ha, ha - that it doesn’t happen. 🙃
My gleaning from what you were driving at was physical, tangible possibility as a repudiation of the prospect that hope is just another form of superstition or folly. I don’t believe that, even if it’s expedient to my reputation as a curmudgeonly eremite to do so, but I wouldn’t be averse to disappointing anyone who rooted for such a character anyhow.
I think those who traffic in hopelessness are largely some amalgam of sore, weakened, spurned, or possibly mentally ill. All of these are innocent until internalized and propagated. Of course, try and tell a self-avowed hopeless person that their rendition of hopelessness is tantamount to a purpose, and you’re sure to be met with some form of chagrin, probably of a decidedly immature stripe.
I do not promulgate from upon the mount. I know because I was there. And I feel the grip of bony fingers trying to pull me back more often than I care to acknowledge.
The bony fingers, still pulling… I trust the ongoing grip more than any clean recovery arc; the tidy ones usually lie about something.
I see the cruelty in the timing you sketch. The thing might arrive once you've rebuilt your whole life around its absence, and then what, the creak as coronary event? But the terrifying door and the failed door hang on the same hinge. You've learned to stand near it regardless and it looks like nothing from outside. It's the entire matter!
Thank you, Ian, for this fascinating dialogue!
We can refer to it as Schrödinger’s door, I suppose, but that’s a stretch.
As always, it’s your party, Tamara. I am simply privileged to cater to it in my own way. 🌷
Correction: “belie their fealty…”; not “betray”.
This was a most-engaging essay -- and I admit that much of my engagement was counter-argumentative -- in a dialectic sense. The evils that fought each other to get out of the box are arrogant and self-centered. Hope is neither of those, so of course it did not get out before them. So are we to think of hope: humble and open to people and other possibilities. The "Saw" films underscore this: in their desperation to survive people engage in self-mutilation and are willing to do anything to another -- utterly self-centered in the most primitive animal sense and incapable of the hope you describe as an attitude without specific object.
What Kant and Hegel and DesCartes and Francis Fukuyama ("The End of History") mistake is that there is no perpetual motion machine. What they see -- and they have created the zeitgeist -- is a perpetual motion machine that just makes things better for humanity; but this engine of progress does not create its own future. No: it chews up the physical world, destroys people, and animals and even single-celled organisms all without thought. It rests in patriarchy, and racism (else why are all the poorest people those of color?)
It is this absolutism that is as dangerous as any thought of Stalin or Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler. For when you know the future will be utopia AND you know the content of that utopia, any sacrifice is worth it -- though it goes unsaid that the sacrifices will be born almost entirely by the powerless who would benefit most from utopia. Thus, I submit tautology than teleology to find the future in the present which is not logical at all but basic solipsism.
To apprehend beauty in any form, to be moved emotionally, to sigh in contentment..., we can experience these as gifts and cannot find them no matter where we search. If I approach a painting with any expectation -- even of being moved in some way -- that pre-condition will prevent from seeing the painting as it exists for my mind and soul.
The un-hoped thing, as you suggest, is an attitude open to but not expecting grace. It is that recognition of grace that your open comment recognizes. To be "given hope" means an inspiration that the un-hoped thing may come to pass -- and we are far more likely to recognize is open and not expecting something else.
I am glad your reading of the jar corrects mine, the evils escaped first because velocity is native to arrogance. Hope lagged because humility does not lunge. Elpis remaining inside was never the consolation the myth pretends. She stays with us, yes, but her staying is also a form of captivity. What sustains us is also what we cannot fully release into the world. That ambivalence is honest.
I love the perpetual motion machine, a device that manufactures betterment while consuming the very substrate it runs on, pretending the fuel is free. Teleology has always been generous with other people’s sacrifices. The utopia is deferred; the bill is not, and it arrives, unfailingly, at the addresses the least able to pay it. When the endpoint is both known and non-negotiable, cruelty rebrands itself as arithmetic. Stalin balanced those books. So did Pol Pot.
To locate the future in the present and then call it “discovery” is to smuggle your conclusion into your premise and congratulate yourself on the arrival. Solipsism dressed as historical law. The system proves only that it was built to prove itself.
sure, expectation is a screen, not a lens, it forecloses the encounter. Grace, if we can bear the word without its incense, refuses to answer a summons, coming to those already turned slightly away, attending to nothing in particular, which returns us to being “given” hope, and why it can never be requested: the moment you ask, you’ve installed the expectation that guarantees its absence.
Thank you for arguing with me, JP, in the most incredible way! This is the reading I want the most.
If I may, arguments are counter-propositions, and you have elegantly refined mine -- to the point of synthesis that is mutual.
Screen vs lens, cruelty hides within arithmetic, the dishonesty of "discovery" in logical positivism.
Engaging with you, Tamara, is ever an enlightening delight. My arguments with Hegel and other idealists are less rewarding and I am not at all charitable. Indeed, a character in a novel I'm writing says: "Reading Hegel is about as interesting in the moment and ultimately soul draining as heroin. Or so the analogy comes to me."
Synthesis that's mutual is the only one worth reaching. Your character on Hegel made me snort. The heroin analogy is crueler and truer than most published criticism, the momentary rush, the long depletion, the diminishing returns that keep you turning pages anyway. Put that line somewhere prominent. Hegel earned it, and your novel will profit. Fabulous, JP!
I’ve seen it many times in my gallery, a collector stands before a canvas that resists them. They can’t grasp the narrative, they feel uncomfortable and their posture changes. They suddenly start waiting for meaning and that’s the closest lived analogue I know to what you've done with your essay, distinguishing hope-as-demand from hope-as-availability.
From Epictetus to Bloch to Kant your argument resolves a real tension. I’ve noticed that most essays on hope either moralize toward optimism or collapse into fashionable despair. But you built a ladder.
Consider why unfinished works like Michelangelo's “Prisoners”, straining half-formed out of raw marble, often move us more than the finished David. A completed sculpture answers a question. An unfinished one keeps one open. Bloch's "not-yet" is structurally identical, the “Prisoners” are utopia in stone, hope with no fixed terminus, only direction. Collectors buy them because they refuse a sort of closure they are seeking, and that refusal feels more honest than certainty.
I believe this is pragmatically useful beyond aesthetics too. Any dealer, curator, or gallerist who's survived a market crash knows the difference between speculating on what a piece "will be worth" (fragile, disappointment-prone hope) and simply staying in the room, attentive, ready for whatever unexpected work or buyer or shift arrives next (espérance, functionally). The latter is what actually sustains people through bad years.
You never perform in your writing, Tamara, and I admire that about you. The “unhoped-for” as a name for what exceeds expectation, what a brilliant phrase!
The “Prisoners” undo the lazy assumption that incompletion is privation. But those figures aren't thwarted “Davids”; the non-finito is constitutive. Release them from the marble and you abolish the torsion that arrests us. The gap IS the content, Bloch's “Noch-Nicht” made lapidary, the not-yet you can lay a palm against.
Staying in the room wears the aspect of idleness while being its antipode, exacting vigil, disguised as a man standing still.
Thank you for the stone, Alexander, your comments are art!
Your musing about the movement of unfinished works is food for thought, Alexander. I actually hadn’t thought of it that way. A completed work, like a completed task or vision, leaves much less to the imagination.
In similar vein, a completed task or scenario or one that has a definitive outcome leaves no room for hope or for alternatives or variation or imagination or what have you. Forgive me if I’m losing the point, but it seems like what you’re trying to get across.
Completion forecloses, incompletion invites. That's really the whole ethics of hope in miniature, to finish a thing is to fix its meaning, to leave it open is to let others still participate in becoming. Maybe that's why her essay ends "still turned toward a world that hasn't finished with its surprises", she refused her own closure on purpose.
Very sharp point, Ian.
I hadn’t noticed that, either. I’m actually not very well attuned to subtext. Or anything else, for that matter. Can’t say I’m not working on it, but I can tell if your G and B guitar strings aren’t tuned to the proper interval. That might count for something. 🙃
It counts for a great deal, that's perfect pitch for dissonance. You hear when something's off before you can say why. That's not so different from writing a piece that senses, structurally, when an idea has resolved too neatly and needs another turn. I think you’re more attuned than you're giving yourself credit for.
That’s both uplifting and insightful, Alexander. Many thanks.
And suddenly you make Kant feel like a text from someone you have a crush on, vague, maddening, stunning and somehow worth waiting by the phone for. Tamara, you've made philosophy cool again, which is basically a miracle on the order of making dial-up sound romantic.
Modern hope is procrastination. "I'll deal with it later" is despair. "It'll work out" is hope. While l'espérance is optimism that finally learned PR.
I can’t add anything else to this formidable essay.
I laughed at espérance as optimism that finally hired a publicist. Though… optimism does PR for a product that may not exist. Espérance skips the product entirely and just keeps the lights on. Same department, different job description. And the crush-text reading of Kant is dangerously accurate. Maddening was the method, I think.
Thank you, dear Céline, you made me laugh and think in the same breath!
Through what lens do we witness hope today? The lens closest at hand to me has recently revealed something alarming:
I have lately been witness to a rising class of people the likes of which has not been seen since the days of some god-forsaken war or plague that overstayed its welcome, the weary class. Burdened souls withered by the unrelenting onslaught of the present, the flash flood of too much. Too much everything, too much life. A bewildered people, caught up in the wash cycle of a persistent precarity of purpose. A sentenced people with the weight of judgment passed on them, not of justice, but caprice. Clothed in an undefined defeat, dispirited, they are weary of a blame that swoops in on them from the circling uncertainties laying siege to their sense of hope. Hopeless, they bear the pressure of an original sin never committed, yet felt to the bone.
These weary ones cluster in their families, their friend groups, their colleague and peer communities, unaware of their mutual weariness, each wearing a specific weariness in their own waried sense of isolation. Lost in a presence of the past with no beachhead on Future's frontier shores. Yet, as a class, they are everywhere; and the cumulative depth of their despair is remarkable. The tell is not a particular posture or a given gait. It is in the eyes that reflect the fierce freedom that blows through their world. A wild wind wreaking havoc in an avalanche of choice, a despair of accountability, a blind faith in something missing. An unaddressed grief of hopelessness is the signature profile.
It is not just those broken bodies found on the park benches or sidewalk stoops lying listlessly under their cardboard shelters; it’s the everyday employee shuffling into their fast food/fast clothes service job a half-inch smaller than yesterday and leaving eight hours later a half-inch smaller still, it’s the gig worker performing for tips with a smile and a black well of emptiness behind their colorless pupils, it’s the small-town farmer drained of small-town pride like a reservoir dried to cracking, stripped of the ancient source of that pride, self-reliance stirred with a spoonful of hope.
I witness despair among unimaginable abundance, prosperity within a deathly desperation.
What is hope, truly, but a living cell dividing into two. Non-telelogical growth. Hope is a maturation process abstracted, life giving volition to sun rays, literally. Why then does hopelessness flood our modern landscapes? The paradox of rational individualism itself is one invasive species. Carried to its logical extreme, it lands in a politics of severe inequality, the shame of personal responsibility within a context of social dynamism and containment, and a world of futures compressed into a singular form of growth, exponential progress that scales beyond human capacity.
St. Paul might have said it best when he identified the highest three human qualities: faith, hope, and charity. Of these, he said, hope is the greatest; or did he?
Hope’s collapse is not evenly distributed, and it wears the mask of prosperity. The weary class suffers a peculiarly modern affliction, indicted without a crime, sentenced by contingency. I like rhat inversion of original sin, older theology at least offered absolution, this one withholds even the charge, so there’s nothing to confess and no one to confess to.
I’d name the mechanism differently than you do. That fierce freedom blowing through their eyes is the terminus of the rationalist overreach I traced, the promise that the future is plottable, ours to engineer. When that promise hardens into a demand and the arrival never comes, the individual is left holding a debt that was never theirs to incur. Progress privatised its failures, hence the shame, the residue of a collective myth billed to a single account.
Hope as mitosis, volition without terminus, growth that doesn’t know where it’s headed and doesn’t need to = Bloch’s “not-yet” rendered biological, demolishing the objection that hope requires an object. The dividing cell hopes for nothing. It simply continues.
As for Paul, what a lovely trap you set. He ranked “charity” the highest, not hope. But I think your slip is the truer reading. Charity is what hope looks like once it starts spending itself on someone else’s future . Perhaps that’s the only exit from the weary class: hope turns bearable when it’s no longer yours.
Thank you for this, Andrew, you turned an abstraction into a census!
The final hope lies in this truth: whatever barbarism, whatever atrocities, conjured up and between men, no devastation upon the earth will ever cast a shadow across the sun. No breath of corruption, as Dostoevski calls the stinch of death rising out of decaing flesh, will kiss the heavens. All consequence is limited to the actors upon the stage. The celestial audience remains unaffected, even if briefly entertained by the horror film unfolding on the tiny blue dot.
An essay that thinks with its citations instead of hiding behind them, moving from Epictetus to Jigsaw without ever losing its own voice. Tamara, the supernova!
Hope may be less a belief about the future than a “tense” the self borrows to stay habitable. Grief, similarly, is the mind's forced conjugation into a past that won't resolve. Bloch's "not-yet" is grammar. To hope is to refuse the present indicative as the only available mood, insisting on the subjunctive, not what is, but what might be if the world consented. Hope is syntax before it's sentiment.
Hope as the subjunctive mood, the linguist in me is pleased. It reframes the whole quarrel. The Stoics were counseling us to stay in the indicative, to inhabit only what is. And grief as forced conjugation into an unresolving past is almost unbearably right; mourning really does feel like being declined, grammatically, against your will.
Bur the subjunctive isn't a mood we choose, some languages barely have one. Perhaps despair is just a tongue that lost the conjugation?
Thank you so much, Clara, you are impressive!
Wow, Tamara. Another one of my favorite pieces of yours.
This one took me back to a cherished part of myself- the days as a college scholar reading and writing critical essays like this for my Religious Studies degree. This writing is well-crafted, percolating philosophically, and will linger long into the night as many of your best pieces do…
On a more personal note, this piece also resonated quite deeply (of course ✨). In the years of purging many of my favorite gifts and sentiments left behind from a significant partnership I have spoken of here in comments before, the last item standing- which from time to time I find stored in the way back of a closet, is a framed black and white ink line drawing of a landscape, in which he so beautifully incorporated the word “HOPE” stretching across a wide canyon. It’s such a simple piece, but one of my favorite items I own. Even in my best efforts, I don’t believe I’ll ever part with it.
This essay helped me remember why, in a way I hadn’t considered. Thank you. ✨
I am so grateful when you share glimpses of your life, Lucy, it is always inspirational under one form or another, and in this case I can frankly say that outliving every other gift from that partnership was never really about him, or not only. You’ve kept the word, not the giver. HOPE stretched across a canyon, the image already contains its argument for a canyon is the gap you can’t cross only by wishing, and the word spans it anyway without pretending the drop isn’t there.
There’s alwyas a reason the sentimental gifts purge easily and this one wouldn’t go. The others said “remember” us.This one says something that started pointing forward, at that canyon still in front of you, at whatever hasn’t crossed yet. I do believe it’s easier to release a keepsake than to throw away a live instruction.
The unhoped-for, a notion so dear to me that I wanted people to understand and spread forward, doesn’t stay on display. You need to wait for it
I am so enchanted my essay returned you to the college scholar too. I have to thank you again for trusting my comment section!
I was once told a sentence by a Chan and Tantric Master "Hope is the little sister of fear" .
When reading the first part of your essay it returned. Because if one looks closer- and as you wrote for example this:
"To hope to grow rich, to keep one’s health, to recover from illness, or to make one’s happiness hang on winning a good reputation, is thus to mark oneself out as fortune’s prey, for we have no control over wealth, over health, or over renown." - as long as hope has an object, it is often born from the fear of the opposite happening.
We hope to recover from illness, because we fear that we are not. We hope to stay healthy, because we fear to get sick. I hope that my dog does not step on a bee, because I fear he does and gets another allergic shock which may kill him. This wish to control is linked to fear too.
So that kind of hope, the "classic hope" at its origin- is fear.
What you described later feels different to me and I would not use the word hope, but as you offered- maybe openness. A presence kind of saying "when nothing is sure, everything is possible" . This does not need certainty, it neither needs knowledge and it may even embrace our natural capacity of fear, consciously experienced and then maybe in the possibilty of being a motor to act when necessary or to receive or to become creative despite all odds.
I read your comment and I had the feeling I was in conversation with Frank Herbert, over tea speaking about his fear, his “Litany Against Fear” ringing in my ears like a mantra: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." Because your master’s line seems true to me: object-hope and fear are the same current running two directions. I hope for X BECAUSE I fear not-X, the two cut from one cloth, and the fabric is the wish to control an outcome that was never mine. I see your point clearly! Your dog and the bee represent the mechanism in miniature (by the way, I share the same fear about my dog since 2023 when he stepped on some kind of Asian wasp in Marbella, but I digress). The hope is precisely fear-shaped. It has the exact contour of the dread it tries to answer, which means, chased far enough, hope-with-an-object IS the fear, wearing the one mask that makes it bearable to hold. Quite insidious I would say and terrifying
That reframes the Stoic suspicion beautifully. They warned that hope makes us fortune’s prey, but your master locates WHY: because such hope is already fear, and fear is the state of being owned by what you can’t control, whether we are control freaks or just normal people. To hope for the outcome is to have conceded that you’re afraid of its absence. The two feelings share a single account and fortune holds the passbook.
I will agree with you because you want to resist the word for the other thing, I felt the strain of using one term for both, which is why I reached for the refined French term, “l’espérance”, but even that keeps the root. Maybe “openness” is cleaner because it drops the etymology? I guess it’s better since what you describe doesn’t answer fear by promising the good outcome. Instead it lets the fear stay, fully felt, no longer needing to be converted into its hopeful disguise. “When nothing is sure, everything is possible” works only if you’ve stopped demanding a particular result, meaning you’ve stopped fearing its opposite, meaning the fear can finally be what it is instead of pretending it’s hope.
Then fear as a possible motor consciously held sharpens not paralyses and can tip into action or reception or the odd creative leap you make BECAUSE the odds are bad, not despite having talked yourself out of dreading them. That’s a maturity I am aspiring to, hoping (yeah, hoping :) to reach some day. I don’t think I’m there yet
Thank you for the master’s sentence, Karin, and for holding the fear in the open, I’ve surely missed your comments here!
" I hope for X BECAUSE I fear not-X, the two cut from one cloth, and the fabric is the wish to control an outcome that was never mine." Exactly! Perfectly put in one sentence, as I never could. I am sorry to hear that to your dog happened the same, it is our second summer with this "alert" always in the mind, but actually it shows up as a sort of tension in the body. When I walk, fear is always present. Of course I say " I hope he doesn't step on a bee, a wasp or mistakes one of those for a fly and tries to snap for it", but knowing that it is fear speaking and being felt within.
I don't know how mature or not I am in that regards, but as fearing whatsoever was especially in my younger years a constant companion which led to not doing fun things for example because they could go bad, I started to investigate. To not look away. To not disguise. But to hold it. Because I was fearing so much and even quite ridiculous things (Watching my boyfriend at that time wakeboarding, wanting to do it but fearing that I could loose my bikini through the force....), I needed to learn to face and feel it directly. That lead to that I dared to do and try out new things, dared to be at risk to fail or feel hurt, dared to be not loved for standing my ground and so on. The confrontation with fear, sparked curiosity and wonder. And too, that this natural energy is crucial when it comes to immediate action. No need to fear fear.
What came to mind too, that this fear-hope couple are as you pointed out a product of the mind. It is different than an immediate activation of the body to an actual threat. Nevertheless the response or what is going on in the body, is the same.
Your essays are at the moment the only ones I read, though sometimes with delay.
Much love to you dearest Tamara!
The mind’s fear-hope couple /vs/ the body’s immediate activation to a real threat represent the same physiology, entirely different source. The bee on the walk is anticipatory, a story the mind runs forward, the actual snake underfoot needs no story, and Learning to tell them apart might be the whole of the work because the first can be held and questioned while the second should just be obeyed.No need to fear fear. That’s further than most philosophers get.
Much love back, Karen! I am moved and grateful.
Very early on you wrote, "I want to grab hope with my hands and not let it go." I applaud that thought, because I also believe you are one of those people who don't simply hope, you take whatever actions you think will help and make a difference, and then covered with sweat, streaked with dirt, and exhausted (all of it metaphorically or otherwise), then you hope.
A lot of the arguments from the Stoics and others assume that those who hope don't also act - "to be reduced to hoping, by contrast, is to have very little control over how events will unfold..." The reality is that even the person who "undertakes something" has no real control over the outcome either. Things happen - natural disasters, personal disasters (the Silicon Valley guy who was brilliant and doing incredible things tripped on his treadmill, fell, and died), accidents. Those things can blow up the best laid plans and their execution.
I also think about hope and remember doing what I was able to do to support the candidate I wanted to win. Some years it wasn't much, some years it was a lot. In the end, I sat there on election night, hoping my candidate would win, having done all I could, and knowing it wasn't in my control.
Your definition of l'espérance is the key for me to this entire essay: "a free and disinterested availability that leaves us open to whatever." I move forward, I recognise what doesn't work in the present, I do what I am able to do, and I hope. The hope is not the least of it. There are times, the hope is what gives me the strength to get up the next morning regardless of what happens, because successful or not, I still need to get up and keep going.
The Stoics treat acting and hoping as rivals at opposite ends of a control spectrum. But your treadmill man settles it, the one who undertakes has no more grip on the outcome than the one who waits. Control was always a story told about the front of an action, never the back.
So the honest sequence is yours: do the whole of what's yours, then hope the rest! Consecutive, not opposed.
Hope as what gets you vertical the next morning, win or lose. A permit to continue. A fabulous one Thank you, Doc!
Brilliant Tamara … as audacious as it’s the title
Those who hope,” Byung-Chul Han’s writes, “put their trust in possibilities that point beyond the ‘badly existing.’ Hope enables us to break out of closed time as a prison.” Hope challenges the sense that we are on an irreversible course toward a certain end. For hope, the future is not a runaway train on a fixed track. There might be a way that we’ll come out of this OK.
This kind of hope grants a certain patience about the future, but it also allows one to act, sustaining the day-to-day in a richer way, seeking and pursuing remedies for the problems plaguing us. Unlike frenetic busyness, unlike the compulsive achievement-seeking that Han has diagnosed so trenchantly in earlier books like The Burnout Society, hopeful actions are more deliberate and decisive, more attuned to the world beyond the ego. “Those who act with hope,” Han explains, “act audaciously and are not distracted by the rapidity and toughness of life. However, there is also something contemplative about hope. It leans forward and listens attentively. The receptivity of hope makes it tender, lends it beauty and grace.” Hope is future-oriented, but it is so in a way that illuminates, that gives us back, the present: “To the hopeful, the world appears in a different light. Hope gives the world a special radiance; it brightens the world.”
Han insists that hope ultimately gathers others into a community. Hope is a rallying cry. It can galvanize. Hope not only transcends what we know for certain, but it also transcends the limits of what I can control or accomplish on my own. One of the best chapters in The Spirit of Hope challenges the existentialism of Albert Camus, who expresses a common notion (at least from the twentieth century onward) that hope is weak, static, resigned. Han rejects this as a specious account. Camus’s charges might stick to an everything-will-turn-out-fine optimism, but hope “ensures that, despite all the ills of the world, we do not resign ourselves.” Han frequently draws on the very different existentialism of Camus’s older contemporary Gabriel Marcel, who during the dark days of World War II gave a profound talk on the need for a resilient, open sense of hope. (Han notes that Camus himself strikes more hopeful notes about hope in his Nobel acceptance speech.) For Han, as for Marcel before him, hope is the truly tough-minded and courageous disposition, yet it is also caring and graceful. It encourages “solicitude that lovingly and affectionately turns towards others, that takes care of them.” It is “friendly,” to use one of Han’s favorite words. It draws people together in solidarity. It draws them into a “we.”
Even my beloved Emil Cioran says that it’s impossible live without hope.
Han’s phrase is the reinforcement. Closed time is the prison Kant and Hegel built when they mapped history to its terminus: a future fully known is one already served, a sentence without parole. Hope pries the lid.
And I savour our Cioran conceding hope’s necessity. The great insomniac of despair, admitting the thing can’t be lived without. When even he keeps a candle lit, the argument is essentially over.
Thank you for bringing Han so fully here!
I love how you connected “Saw” to a description of the 20th century.
“Hope” is a very weighty word. Throughout my reading, I kept ticking off words in my head a beat before I encountered them in your essay: waiting, expectation, projection, passivity, disappointment, admission of failure, belief, illusion, desire, uncertainty, consolation, faith, utopia, aspiration…
Despite the word having such versatility, I find myself stuck with my original definition of hope: waiting as a substitute for agency and expecting something entirely out of my control.
Your later turn toward “the unhoped-for” seems like the opposite, which I like better.
The openness of “the unhoped-for” feels like the “maybe yes, maybe no” equanimity of the Chinese Farmer.
It feels like the openness of faith, in the sense of simply being the absence of doubt.
Whether “the unhoped-for” is the new hope, or openness, presence, posture, or readiness, I don’t know which word to pick.
My simple mind is spiraling into mental word salad.
Eenie, meenie, miny… okay, “open presence.”
I’m going to go with open presence.
You didn’t say exactly, but that sounds like the gift you gave the man you loved.
Those words cluster around hope because they’re all symptoms of one condition: leaning toward what you can’t command. You had the shape and were waiting for the labels.
“Open presence” is a better pick than the raffle suggests. It drops the forward-tilt hope can’t shake, keeps the availability.
And yes, your last line is right :) Not a gift I gave him but a capacity he recovered near me, and mistook for a gift…
Thank you, Guy, for reading that closely!
Your "not a gift" correction is painfully precise. That ellipsis is doing a lot of work, at least on me. Thank you for that honesty and I'm sorry.
No, no, never be sorry here, Guy! There’s no need.
very well written and the art chosen is fascinating. it is time to assemble some of your material for a book....essays and poems and media mixed together into a product to read and cherish as a consumer (it helps the economy !)
A part of me believes these essays are dated at the root, they carry the temperature of the week they were written, and a book asks them to stand outside their moment. Some survive that. Some are really letters, and a letter under glass stops being a letter. But the mixed-form instinct tempts me — essays, poems, artwork braided rather than filed in separate drawers. That weave might hold.
Thank you, ron, for wanting it bound! It means a lot to me.
A lot of your writing is more timeless than you may realize. I have to believe you (or your "team") spend quite an effort in selecting images, figuring out spacing and pace for a post, finding the right "face page" and caption. A book is just one more side hustle, there is a need to monetize art for our economy (gives others a reason to promote your work ! ) as you know with Substack ...... thank you for sharing your creativity through Substack.
I wish I had a team…… my life would be much easier! But I have a lot of passion and discipline. And I’m grateful for readers like you!
Tamara, having now read, rather than merely listened to, your essay, with its distracting foibles of pronunciation, I understand a little better what you mean by what I might describe as different kinds of hope.
Openness to future experiences, without trying to overplan in order to be certain of them, is largely why I travel. It opens one to unexpected possibilities. Bonne chance!
Yet I know people who wouldn’t dare travel without a firm itinerary in space & time. I can think of one friend for whom what I might call “freestyle travel”, is anathema. Is this cowardice? Does this help explain why some people have eg, closed minds, & live their lives according to ritualised behaviours? To overplan is to lead to inevitable disappointment, as delayed flights, illness, injury, weather etc are almost bound to affect plans. On the other hand, of course detailed planning is necessary for travel to extreme destinations, undersea & space travel being among them.
As with travel, when I used to go eg clubbing often, it was always to enhance my exposure to the adventure of the unplanned & the unexpected, although dancing & meeting people were my main initial motivators to go.
I’d like to think that my approach to life, epitomised in travel, is the more courageous than the overplanned journey.
Vive l’esperance!
I like that you took the time to revisit my essay with a different mind. In the end, it’s the biggest compliment for any writer. I agree that travel is the cleanest possible demonstration of the distinction, so I guess it’s fitting you found my essay in that space rather than in the philosophy. I see the over-planned itinerary as a sort of fortress built against uncertainty, and like every fortress it keeps out the raid AND the gift.But I’d hesitate before calling your friend a coward, and I think you half-hesitate too. Maybe I’m wrong and you don’t have to answer it or come with more details. It’s just my intuition whispering. What looks like cowardice seems often a different form of fear, for the freestyle traveller can tolerate not knowing what tomorrow holds while the planner tolerates the labour of control better than the vertigo of openness. Neither is braver in the abstract, that’s the paradox. You’ve discovered the unplanned rewards you, and reward teaches courage faster than any principle. Your nerve was earned trip by trip.
Your own caveat is the wise part! Freestyle works for the wander. The seabed and orbit demand the checklist…. there the unexpected doesn’t hand you an adventure, you find a corpse instead, suggesting the real skill is knowing which the terrain requires, I mean loose in the city that surprises, rigid where surprise is fatal. Espérance refers to carrying a map that is lightly enough to be abandoned when a better street appears, and gripping it hard when the street could kill you. It sounds simple, well… it is simple. I have applied that my whole life
So… you can go for the dancing and stay for whoever the night produces. Fun! That’s the whole disposition in miniature, sweatier than Kant but identical underneath :)) even more fun!
One day we should go clubbing together as part of the Museguided salon! :)
It should read “But I’ve not SOLD my dancing shoes”!
And as for dancing, I, like all lovers of dancing, with the right music & company, can dance for hours. It could be a great night before the second & final day of an extended salon, if you think two days is not too long. Perhaps the second day could be a walking discussion, in the Aristotelian tradition, but sur le pont.
I do “half-hesitate”. On numerous occasions during geology field work & bushwalking, I’ve taken the safer route. It’s an instinctive response to sensing danger. All my family do it: no free climbers amongst us. So I’ve sold my bicycles, skis & diving equipment.
And I do very much plan trips, but loosely, not intricately. I like to allow a week in a place, arriving say Thursday, leaving on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, allowing those free days for contingency: illness, injury, bad weather, meeting someone!
But I’ve not my dancing shoes. On a night when my youthful vigour holds out, dancing would be a fantastic thing, post dinner. Whether here in the antipodes, or next year when I plan to come over, in say Paris, London or elsewhere. I had a memorable time in Avignon years ago. Great little restaurants & clubs.
The typo corrects into something better than the original, keeping the dancing shoes is the whole disposition in one image. Dancing is the risk that only ever hands you the good surprise. And the buffer days are the truest espérance in your comment. Not no plan, but a plan with deliberate slack cut into it, margins where illness or a stranger can arrive. You've engineered room for the unengineered.
Sur le pont, then! Danser, forcément.
Oui Oui. Sur le pont d’Avignon, I’on y danse tous en rond!
My issue with stoicism, or at least the version most commonly espoused, is that it presumes a lot more control over the mind than we actually have. We can spend years trying to turn our mind into a manicured garden and get very close for long spells, but ultimately fail.
I am mildly surprised you didn't sneak in any Heidegger in... I feel like hope is tied in to the fact that our being is an issue for us. I suppose hope doesn't have to signify the present is problematic ..
Stoicism oversells itself in the manicured-garden point, treating the mind as a plot you can weed into permanent order, when in practice the weeds return the moment you look away. Marcus Aurelius wrote the same consolations to himself over and over, which rather gives the game away. If the garden held, he'd have needed the note once.
Hahah, yes I dodged Heidegger! “Being an issue for itself” is arguably the ground my essay stands on. Care already leans forward. I flinched from the vocabulary, not the thought. Thank you so much for this!
What a splendid tour with philosopher companions! For me, hope is living with openness to possibility. Not a closed system or certainty of teleological direction, but a willingness to engage the surprising universe with all its organic changes. Hope is a group project, with long vision. Hope is not wishing but engaging. Thanks for your thorough essay.
“Hope is not wishing but engaging” is the line that separates the two camps. Wishing keeps its hands folded; engaging gets them dirty. And "group project with long vision" disposes of the lone hoper waiting for rescue, the surprising universe answers participation, not petition.
Thank you, Hans, for travelling the whole route with me!