What’s the Use of Hope?

By conventional wisdom, hope is empowering, noble, even audacious. In the face of threats to democracy and the slow catastrophe of climate change, we are told, it is vital not to give up hope. Yet as an episode of the sitcom Ted Lasso reminds us: “It’s the hope that kills you.” To hope is to risk the agony of defeat. And what good does hope do as t

When we do not know what we should hope for, we can hope to learn. There is room for what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls “radical hope … directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is”.

Aquinas contrasts hope as an “irascible passion” – a spirited desire for what is not assured – with the theological virtue of hope whose object is eternal life. What we’ve examined so far is the passion: a fusion of desire and belief. Hope in this sense is passive, as the etymology of “passion” attests. The theological virtue is different. It’s an

Between recklessness and cowardice lies courage, for example; and the generous man is neither profligate nor cheap. Each virtue oversees an action or emotion for which it finds an intermediate path. The brave experience fear “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right w

To hope well is to be realistic about probabilities, not to succumb to wishful thinking or be cowed by fear; it is to hold possibilities open when you should. The point of clinging to possibility is not to feel good – hope may be more painful than despair – but to keep the flicker of potential agency alive.

This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the prospect of flourishing despite infirmity, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief, confronting the injustice and absurdity of the world. The question is not whether we should hope, but what we should hope for.