The Spirit of Hope

In this soulful meditation, philosopher Han (The Crisis of Narration) draws from the writings of Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Franz Kafka, and other thinkers to reflect on staying hopeful during fraught times. Pushing back against Camus’s contention that hope spurs resignation, Han argues that it instead motivates people to act by enabling them to imagine possible futures worth fighting for. In this capacity, hope becomes, as poet Ingeborg Bachmann contended, a “condition of the possibility of living.” “The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope,” Han posits, noting that Czech human rights activist Václav Havel viewed hope as a commitment to an idea’s righteousness rather than any expectation of a positive outcome. Suggesting that hope can also foster community, Han describes how in Kafka’s short story “The Great Wall of China,” the endless task of building the eponymous wall unites those involved in its construction around the “hopeless hope” that it will one day be completed. Though some of Han’s finer points are lost in the occasionally vague prose (“It is the authority of the other as a transcendence that raises me up in the face of absolute despair”), he still makes a rousing case for holding onto hope even, and perhaps especially, in times of hardship. This is sure to lift readers’ spirits. Illus. (Dec.)