A Searching Movement

A specter is haunting us: it is fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world or the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever-greater urgency. In 2023, the so-called Doomsday Clock stood at ninety seconds to midnight, apparently the closest the dial has ever been to the end of the final hour.

Anxiously, we confront a bleak future. There is no hope. We muddle through from crisis to crisis, from one catastrophe to another, from one problem to the next. Amid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers. It becomes survival. The breathless survival society is like a terminal patient trying everything to find a cure. But only hope can give us back that life that is more than mere survival. It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon that re-invigorates and inspires life. Hope presents us with a future.

Fear is a popular tool for rulers. It makes people obedient and susceptible to blackmail. In a climate of fear, people worry about repression and so do not dare voice their opinions freely. Hate speech creates fear and thus hinders the free expression of opinions. We even fear thinking. We seem to have lost the courage to think. Thinking proper provides access to what is altogether other. A climate of fear produces a continuation of the same. Conformism spreads. Fear blocks the paths towards the other. What is other escapes the logic of efficiency and productivity, which is a logic of the same.

The rule of fear makes freedom impossible. Fear and freedom are mutually exclusive. Fear can turn society itself into a prison, create a kind of quarantine. Fear puts up warning signs. Hope, by contrast, sets up signposts and pathmarks. Only when there is hope can we be on our way. Hope provides meaning and orientation. Fear, by contrast, stops us in our tracks.

We fear not just viruses and wars. People are also preoccupied with “climate fear.” Climate activists openly admit that they are “afraid of the future.” Fear deprives them of their future. We cannot deny that “climate fear” is justified, but the pervasive climate of fear is a cause for concern. Our problem is not a fear of pandemics but a pandemic of fear. Acting out of fear is not a way of acting that supports a sustainable future, which would require a meaningful horizon and action that forms part of a narrative. Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech, incapable of narration.

The German word Angst (Middle High German angest; Old High German angust) originally meant “narrowness.” Angst suffocates any feeling of vastness, of perspective, by narrowing down and blocking our view. Someone who is fearful feels cornered. Fear is accompanied by a feeling of being caught and imprisoned. When we are fearful, the world seems to be a prison. All the doors that lead out into the open are locked. Fear blocks off the future by closing our access to what is possible, what is new.

Only in the deepest despair does true hope arise. The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope. It is no accident that Elpis (the Greek goddess of hope) is represented as the child of Nyx, the goddess of the night. Among the siblings of Nyx are not just Tartarus and Erebus (darkness) but also Eros. Elpis and Eros are related. Hope is a dialectical figure. The negativity of despair is constitutive for hope. Saint Paul also emphasizes the negativity inherent in hope: “We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed.”

Despair and hope relate to each other like valley and mountain. The negativity of despair is inscribed in hope. Nietzsche spells out their dialectical relationship as follows:

Hope is the rainbow over the cascading torrent of life, swallowed up a hundred times by the foam and forming ever anew, crossing the torrent with tender and graceful audacity where its roar is the wildest and most dangerous.

There could be no better description of hope. It possesses a “tender and graceful audacity.” Those who act with hope act audaciously and are not distracted by the rapidity and toughness of life. There is, however, also something contemplative about hope. It leans forward and listens attentively. The receptivity of hope makes it tender, lends it beauty and grace.

Hopeful thinking is not optimistic thinking. Unlike hope, optimism lacks negativity. It knows neither doubt nor despair. Its essence is sheer positivity. Optimism is convinced that things will take a turn for the good. For optimists, the nature of time is closure. They do not know the future as an open space of possibility. Nothing occurs. Nothing surprises. The future appears available. The real future, however, is characterized by unavailability. Optimists never look into an unavailable distance. They do not reckon with the unexpected or incalculable.

Optimism does not lack anything. It is not on its way. But hope is a searching movement. It is an attempt to find a firm footing and a sense of direction. By going beyond the events of the past, beyond what already exists, it also enters into the unknown, goes down untrodden paths, and ventures into the open, into what-is-not-yet. It is headed for what is still unborn. It sets off towards the new, the altogether other, the unprecedented.

Optimism requires no effort. It is something given, taken for granted, like someone’s height or other unaltering characteristics. As an optimist, writes Terry Eagleton, “you are chained to your cheerfulness like a slave to his oar, a glum enough prospect.” An optimist does not need to provide reasons for adopting his attitude. The existence of hope, by contrast, cannot simply be taken for granted. It awakens. Frequently, it must be called upon, appealed to. Unlike optimism, which lacks all determination, active hope is characterized by commitment. An optimist does not properly act. Action is always associated with risk, and an optimist does not take risks.

There is no fundamental difference between optimism and pessimism. One mirrors the other. For the pessimist, time is also closed. Pessimists are locked in “time as a prison,” as Gabriel Marcel said. Pessimists simply reject everything, without striving for renewal or being open towards possible worlds. They are just as stubborn as optimists. Optimists and pessimists are both blind to the possible. They cannot conceive of an event that would constitute a surprising twist to the way things are going. They lack imagination of the new and passion for the unprecedented. Those who hope put their trust in possibilities that point beyond the “badly existing,” in Ernst Bloch’s phrase. Hope enables us to break out of closed time as a prison.

Hope also needs to be distinguished from “positive thinking” and “positive psychology.” In turning away from the psychology of suffering, positive psychology aims to engage exclusively with well-being and happiness. Negative thoughts are to be immediately replaced with positive ones. The aim of positive psychology is to increase happiness. All negative aspects of life are ignored. It imagines the world as one giant department store, where whatever we want we can buy.

According to positive psychology, everyone is responsible for their own happiness. Its cult of positivity means that the afflicted have only themselves, rather than society, to blame. Positive psychology suppresses the fact that suffering is always socially mediated. It psychologizes and privatizes suffering. What really causes suffering—the social context of delusion—is left untouched.

The cult of positivity isolates people, makes them egotistical, and reduces empathy. People are no longer interested in the suffering of others. Everyone looks only to their own happiness and well-being. In the neoliberal regime, the cult of positivity dissolves societal solidarity. Unlike positive thinking, hope does not turn away from the negative aspects of life. It remains mindful of them. Hope does not isolate people; it unites and reconciles them. The subject of hope is a We.

The Epistle to the Romans states that “hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” The temporal mode of hope is not-yet. Hope opens itself up to the coming, for what-is-not-yet. It is a spiritual attitude, a spiritual mood, that elevates us above what is already there, above what is already present. Hope, according to Marcel, “is engaged in the weaving of experience now in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward.” To hope means “to put one’s trust in reality,” to believe in it so that it carries with it a future. When we hope, we become creditors to the future. Fear, by contrast, deprives us of all belief, withdraws all credit granted to reality. It thus prevents the future.

The current omnipresent fear is not really the effect of an ongoing catastrophe. We are plagued by vague fears that have structural causes and therefore cannot be linked back to concrete events. The neoliberal regime is a regime of fear. It isolates people by making them entrepreneurs of themselves. Total competition and the increasing pressure to perform erode society. This narcissistic isolation creates loneliness and fear. Our relation to ourselves is also increasingly dominated by fear: fear of failing, fear of not living up to one’s own expectations, fear of not keeping up with the rest, or fear of being left behind. The ubiquity of fear is good for productivity.

To be free means to be free of compulsion. In the neoliberal regime, however, freedom produces compulsion. These forms of compulsion are not external; they come from within. The compulsion to perform and the compulsion to optimize oneself are compulsions of freedom. Freedom and compulsion become one. We voluntarily submit ourselves to the compulsion to be creative, efficient, authentic.

The often-invoked concept of creativity, in particular, prevents the emergence of something radically different, something unheard of. Creativity is associated with a new form of production. The society that promotes creativity, the performance society, is a service society. Creativity establishes itself as a neoliberal dispositif that, like any dispositif, has a compulsive character. Its purpose is solely to increase productivity.

Classical modernity’s emphasis on the radically new is alien to the postmodern creative dispositif. In classical modernity, people strove to be “starting from the very beginning,” to “begin by clearing a tabula rasa.” Walter Benjamin goes on to mention a number of modern artists and writers who were inspired by “starting from the very beginning.” They resolutely turned away from the musty bourgeoisie and turned instead “to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.” The postmodern creative dispositif is not on its way towards a new birth. It lacks the pathos of the new, the passion for the new. It produces only variations of the same.

Today’s depressed and hopeless society is reflected in the dystopian science-fiction film Children of Men. The film depicts humankind as approaching its end, threatened by extinction. For reasons that are unclear, no woman has become pregnant for the last eighteen years. The youngest person on earth, the eighteen-year-old “Baby Diego,” is killed in the film’s opening scene. The world is shaken by violence, terror, chaos, xenophobia, and environmental disaster. If the good news of the Christmas story, “A child has been born unto us,” is a message of hope, mankind’s sterility represents complete hopelessness. Yet miraculously, a woman becomes pregnant. She is meant to be brought to a secret place where scientists undertake research in the hope of securing humanity’s continued existence. In the final scene, the pregnant character, Kee—played, fittingly, by Clare-Hope Ashitey—is saved from distress in rough seas by a ship named Tomorrow.

Mark Fisher says of the film:

Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no breaks, no “shocks of the new” to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the “weak messianic” hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen.

In Children of Men, humanity falls into collective depression. The act of birth, a synonym for a future whose task is to create the new, no longer takes place. The coming-into-the-world, giving birth, is altogether undone. The world resembles a hell of the same. Depression robs humanity of all hope. The depressed, exhausted future consists of the constant repetition of the same. Nothing opens up. Nothing new enters the world. The invigorating, encouraging, inspiring future, that is, l’avenir, is entirely absent. No departure, no tomorrow, no incipit vita nova, no escape from the same, from the old, seems possible. Depression is the exact opposite of hope, which is passion for the new. Hope is the spring, the zest, that liberates us from our depression, from an exhausted future.