Keeping Hope Alive (10.06.2025)

Now Liberation Day is over and we are back to our daily lives, I thought I’d write about hope. We live in a world of tragedy where suffering seems inexhaustible, from starving children to young people crumbling under the weight of modern society.

Yet it’s often in the quiet moments when we’re offered a glimmer of hope. I’m thinking of the signing of a Framework of Friendship between Biberach and Guernsey. I was lucky to witness this formal reconciliation which underpins a true friendship that has developed over the years. My only regret? That it wasn’t done in public, along the Front, for all to witness.

Here we have a tangible demonstration of a hope fulfilled. But what do we mean by ‘hope’ and how do we understand it? This is trickier than you might think. Try to define the word and you’ll see what I mean.

What distinguishes hope from desire? And is hope a belief about the future, or not? More importantly, does hope sustain us or does it delude us?

The myth of Pandora’s box gives us some insight into how the ancients understood the idea. Hesiod tells us that Pandora opened a jar and let lose all the evils that afflict our world. Only one thing remained, ‘elpis’. The Greek word is usually translated as hope but it might also mean ‘deceptive expectation’. Given these two meanings, we can wonder why ‘elpis’ remained in the jar. Was it so humankind might have hope in the face of evil, meaning hope is good? Or was it to damn us with an unrealistic (even lazy) expectation that ‘all will be well in the end’? Or can both hold, depending on our nature?

Today, we are more positive about hope and generally agree on certain conditions.

For one thing, hope is usually about the future. It is forward looking and contains within it the desire for a specific outcome. It is also based on what we believe is possible and what we value as good. So, I can hope that the Framework of Friendship I saw signed in Candie Museum might one day be repeated between Israel and Palestine.

This raises many issues. Not everything I believe is possible (logically or realistically) and not all my desires are hopes. Moreover, some of them are about the past. My aunt died last summer, and I really hope she had a good death.

Our analysis of hope, then, has two distinct approaches. One is theoretical and the other is practical.

The theoretical aspect is philosophical. It looks at whether the hope we have is rational or not.  Something is rational if it’s logical (like, 2+3 =5) or can be justified. It also looks at the definition of a word. Take the Friendship signing between Israel and Palestine: justification is low given recent history, and what I call ‘hope’ might well be a misplaced desire.

In contrast, the practical aspect of hope considers its value in our lives: how it sustains us and how it motivates us. Those who hope for reconciliation, will work towards it and find meaning in what they are doing. So, despite its theoretical limitations, this hope might have practical value.

What then of my aunt’s death? My hope that it was good isn’t rational given what I know about her last hours, and it isn’t practical either because my hope is retrospective.

Does that mean my hope has no value? Of course not. Its value rests in its intrinsic worth; it’s a good directed towards someone else which increases my self-awareness (I’m not an egoist) and allows me to practice such attitudes in the future.

And it is this understanding of hope that I find the most inspiring. It turns hope into a virtue. It is the antidote to despair (as Kierkegaard said). We should live in hope so we can live ‘to the possibility of the good’. The good, for Kierkegaard, resides in the eternal but you don’t have to be a theist to capture what he is saying. Reason can only take us so far in our understanding of the world, after that we leap into hope. If we don’t, we live in hopelessness and with that comes all the ills of anguish, disillusionment, despondency and grief.