Hope, now, is an exercise to see if I still have it in me to hope, despite all the reasons not to that are staring me in the face. The effort of hoping yields its own rewards, no matter the outcome and as intangible as they may sometimes seem. [. . .] Right now, it’s all we’ve got as we stand like Pippin waiting for the next battle, hoping to have hope.
— William Rivers Pitt
Pitt is senior editor and lead columnist for the online alternate news source Truthout. The lines above come from his opinion piece “Two Years of COVID Have Forced Us to Recalibrate Our Concept of Hope,” which was published in Truthout on Christmas Day, 2021.
Nor is Christmas, that time of the fulfillment of expectant awaiting, a bad time to think hope all the way through. Perhaps we can thereby even learn better how to think—by learning something of how to let hope call thought forth.
However, any hope that could initiate thinking by calling it forth would have to be a thoroughly hope-less hope in one important sense. It would have to be authentic hope—hope that has clarified itself entirely, freeing itself from every bit of in-authentic hope that clings to it.
Such hopeless hope is what is truly most worth hoping for.
The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind.
— G. K. Chesterton
* * *
In reality hope is the worst of all evils because it prolongs our torments.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Waiting is more initiating and far-reaching than all hoping, which always counts with something on something.
— Martin Heidegger
Any hope the fulfillment of which counts on some specific outcome to a given situation tends to denature hope. Such hoping for a pre-defined outcome robs hope of its full power, its infinite capacity to keep open the way to whatever the future may bring. It turns hope from an open and opening willed expectancy that can never be extinguished into a closed and closing wishful expectation that is always doomed to eventual frustration — something that, as Nietzsche says in the line from him above, always just prolongs an underlying torment.
Authentic hope accepts with gratitude whatever is given, and then communicates such grateful acceptance to others. True hope refuses ever to let itself be closed off and shut down, and it always extends itself broadly. It is infectious.
In contrast, false hope is no more than a disguised wish, the mere simulacrum of genuine hope. Such false hope is selfish, self-centered, and easily shut down. It remains incommunicable.
Sartre famously said that life begins the other side of despair. Given the etymology of the word despair (from Latin de- “without” plus sperare “to hope”) that means that life begins the other side of hopelessness.
It is only there, too, that true hope is born.
* * *
Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.”
— Romans 4:18 (NRSV)
True hope does not prolong one’s torment, as does the false hope Nietzsche addresses. Instead, true hope overcomes torment. It continues without reservation to trust that the promises it has received will be fulfilled, regardless of how desolate things may appear at any given moment. Only such persistent, unfathomably faithful trust is authentic hope, freed from all the tormenting illusions of false hope. True hope simply trusts. It is filled full of nothing but faith.
True hope does not count on things turning out in some given way at some given time, if only one manages well — manages, for example, to have the luck to place one’s bets on the winning number in some game of roulette. True hope opens out beyond all issues of efficacy and expectation, as Heidegger knew and said in the second epigraph to the preceding section of this post.
True hope also has nothing of selfishness or the calculation of private interest about it. In contrast with all such self-centered concern, true hope opens beyond itself, embracing everyone, oneself included, with pure love.
In Christian scripture, Paul knew all that; and let it be known to others, as when he wrote in the following famous verses:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NRSV)
* * *
To live without hope is to cease to live.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
— Walter Benjamin
Dostoevsky and Benjamin are speaking of true hope in the lines above.
They knew what they were talking about.
A hope-inspiring picture.