Prelude

A spectre 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.

Versions of the apocalypse abound. They are even offered as commodities: apocalypses sell. An apocalyptic mood is spreading, not only in real life but in literature and film as well. In The Silence, Don DeLillo describes a total technological blackout. Surface temperatures and sea levels are rising in literature, too. Climate fiction has become a new literary genre. T. C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth, for instance, tells the story of an apocalyptic climate change.

We are facing multiple crises. 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 reinvigorates and inspires life. Hope presents us with a future.

The climate of fear precludes hope. With fear, depression takes hold. Fear and resentment drive people into the arms of the right-wing populists. They breed hate. Solidarity, friendliness and empathy are eroded. Growing fear and resentment make society more brutal, and ultimately threaten democracy. In his farewell address upon leaving office, US president Barack Obama rightly said, 'Democracy can buckle when we give in to fear.'1 Fear and democracy are incompatible. Democracy flourishes only in an atmosphere of reconciliation and dialogue. Those who believe that their opinions are unimpeachable and who stop listening to others cannot be citizens.

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 and shitstorms also create fear and thus hinder 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 '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.

Hope is fear's opposite in a linguistic sense, too. The entry on 'hoffen' [to hope] in Friedrich Kluge's etymological dictionary says: 'by leaning forward, one tries to look further, with greater precision'.2 The hunting term 'verhoffen' still carries the old meaning of 'hoffen': 'to stand still in order to listen, to hearken, to pick up the scent'. Thus, it is also said 'Der Rehbock verhofft' [The roebuck stops short]. Someone who hopes tries to pick up the scent, that is, tries to find the right way to go.

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 Nyx's siblings are not just Tartarus and Erebus (darkness), but 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.'3

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.4

There could be no better description of hope. It possesses a 'tender, graceful audacity'. Those who act with hope act audaciously and are not distracted by the rapidity and toughness of life. However, there is 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 of their unaltering characteristics. As an optimist, 'you are chained to your cheerfulness like a slave to his oar, a glum enough prospect'.5 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'.6 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'.7 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...