A new book by Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope (Herder, 2024). A collage-like proposal with various pieces linked to hope. Each piece outlines the theme. A freehand drawing appears, but not a portrait of hope. This is Han’s style. He dialogues with Hegel, Heidegger, Havel, Kafka, Bloch, Adorno, Moltmann, Saint Paul, Proust, Scheler, Arendt, Nietzsche, Marcel. From each of them, he extracts suggestive ideas in dialogue and friendly polemics. In this same dialectic of agreements and disagreements, I have finished my reading of Han’s book.
The dialogue he maintains with Václav Havel is luminous. Han says that for Havel, hope is a spiritual dimension, a “spiritual state.” It is an “orientation for the spirit”, an “orientation for the heart” that points out paths. It leads men through territories in which they have no other orientation than itself. Havel does not place hope in the immanence of the world, but rather assumes that it comes from somewhere else, from a “distance”. It sinks its deep roots in the “transcendent” (p. 83).
Hope is a spiritual state, a virtue, and, therefore, a stable disposition of the person by which he rises above himself, longing for the not yet that could happen in the future. A not yet that defies calculation and the merely reasonable. It is not an irrational attitude, denying reality, in its facts and subsequent consequences. It is, rather, a disposition of the spirit that broadens the intellectual, volitional, and affective dimensions of the human condition. A spiritual effusion capable of looking at the future in what it has of novel and surprising.
Hope is not passivity or quietism, sitting on a bench, waiting for things to change without lifting a finger. It is a call to action with arms outstretched in a laborious attitude to achieve the expected future. Action making its way into the contingent future of life: it may or may not be. The die is not cast fatefully. The fatalism of the facts, the dead end, the tyrannical power, are not obstacles to hope. For this, nothing is lost. In the face of the surrender of “you will not be able to do anything”, of “this is inevitable”, of “it has already happened in other places, and it will also happen in your country” and other laments, hope rises up, opening itself to the creative force of freedom. Feet on the ground and a view open to the future, enough to say: why couldn’t things be otherwise?
It is also true that there are hopes and hopes, small and great. For Christians, there is the great hope, that of life after this life, which must be earned here on earth. In this regard, I find Josef Pieper’s observation pertinent – although Han does not cite him – in the face of the reductionism of some versions of existential philosophy when it denies the character of a “path” that the status viatoris has. We are walkers towards fullness, beyond time to enjoy a happiness that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard,” that prepared by God for those who love him (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:9). This vision proper to the theological virtue of hope – coming from elsewhere as Havel intuits – introduces meaning into the trajectory of human narrative. Hence, the ignorance of this openness to the future, writes Benedict XVI in his encyclical Spes salvi, is the cause “of all despair, as well as of all positive or destructive impulses towards the authentic world and the authentic world of man.”
A hope, finally, that unfolds its splendor not in the egotistical encapsulation of the individual, but in the latter’s openness to his neighbor. Gabriel Marcel says it: “Thinking of us, I have placed my hopes in you.” To which Byung-Chul Han adds: hope does not draw its strength from the immanence of the self. Its center is not the self. Whoever has hope is on the way to the other. When one has hope, one trusts in something that transcends oneself. In this, hope resembles faith. The instance of the other as transcendence is what encourages me in the midst of absolute despair. What enables me to rise up in the midst of the abyss (p. 129). Yes, hope encourages, removes obstacles, and pulls us out of the anguishing existential pits. With hope, we know that evil is overcome by the abundance of good.
