The Spirit of Hope

This is a beautiful and inspiring reflection on the importance of hope in our time of radical uncertainty and a bleakly pervasive atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Importantly, fear and selfishness isolate us, while hope unites people and forms communities. This makes action possible by infusing our world with purpose and meaning oriented towards the future. There are four short chapters: a prelude, hope and acting, hope and knowledge, and hope as a form of life. Authors discussed include Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, Albert Camus and Jurgen Moltmann. The illustrations by Anselm Kiefer portray the varying moods of the text, where hope itself is characterised as a mood, or, in the words of Havel, a dimension of the soul, an orientation of the spirit.

The style is epigrammatic: ‘Life and hope become one. To live means to hope… hope is a force, a momentum… hope inhabits the future…to hope means to be ready for the birth of the new… hope opens itself up to the coming, for what is not yet.’ ‘The climate of fear precludes hope… the rule of fear makes freedom impossible. Fear and freedom are mutually exclusive… to be free means to be free of compulsion… hope is a counter, even a counter-mood, to fear: rather than isolating us it unites and forms communities… there is no revolution through fear. The fearful submit to domination. Revolution can only come about through a hope for another, better world… the politics of hope creates an atmosphere of hope against a regime of fear.’ Only communities can re-create social coherence in a world where relationships have been replaced by contacts: ‘we live in a touchless society. Unlike physical touch, contact does not create closeness.’ These extracts convey the sense and spirit of the book, which concludes that hope is oriented beyond the death, where ‘the fundamental formula of hope is the coming-into-the-world of birth.’