Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope. Translated by Daniel Steuer. New York: Polity, 2024, 111 pp. ISBN: 9781509565191
Reviewed by Tanner R. Layton, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, Western University
For Joel Faflak.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates
– Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act IV
Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope explores hope as an existential mood we’re susceptible to, one that anticipates the birth of something new, and, ultimately, one that we commit to. “Hope is open, and moves into the open” (81). The “hopeful are on their way towards the other” (79); they have not arrived; they are on their way; “hope is searching movement. It is an attempt to find a firm footing and 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” (5). Hope is the attentive mood that makes one receptive to the signs of something different, something other. “New beginnings,” Han writes, “are impossible without hope” (35).
In the Christian tradition, the birth of Jesus serves as an instructive event for Han: “The glad tiding ‘A child has been born unto us’ is a genuine expression of hope” (35). It is a possibility “beyond all likelihood” (69), an event that doesn’t belong properly to the world. For Han, hope itself is born in Bethlehem and the Christian subject takes its direction from it. It is a miracle that “inspires action” (35), leading not “to idle passivity” nor resignation—as the common critique goes—but rather to actively confronting “the world in its full negativity” and thereby nourishing “the spirit of revolution” (37). Hope enchants the world, and the subjects overcome by it are moved by “a deep conviction that something is meaningful” (51). The structure of Han’s hope, then, is threefold: first, it precedes action—“Humans can act because they can hope” (35)—second, it happens to us—it’s “born unto us”—and, third, it anticipates “something different.”
This conceptualization of hope responds to a 21st century affective situation that, rather than simply conditioning our cultural politics, “is haunting us” (1). The spectre that Han is wrestling with is “fear.” For Han, fear is the antithesis of hope; it renders hope unthinkable. Fear makes us thoughtless. As he proclaims, in this climate of fear, “[w]e seem to have lost the courage to think” (2). Thought and hope, however, are allies. This “thinking of hope,” this “thinking that hopes” (86), has its roots in otherness. Whereas thinking “provides access to what is altogether other,” a fear of thinking “produces a continuation of the same” (2).
Hope, then, à la Han, opens us to the future, but he’s careful in defining it. To do so, he adapts Derrida’s distinction between ‘future’ and ‘l’avenir.’ These “two forms of the future” differ primarily in their availability. While we can foresee and map out the future, l’avenir “escapes all calculation and planning”; while we can bring about the future in a way that unfolds according to our expectations, l’avenir “concerns events that occur altogether unexpectedly” (7). The crux of the matter is this: a future that can be designed and “administered” is a future that is subject to the world as it is—a world where “[w]e voluntarily submit ourselves to the compulsion to be creative, efficient, authentic” (9). This world is our world: a world ostensibly preoccupied with innovation and ‘the new.’ But, in this world, “the new […] is not something altogether other”; “[s]elf-creation,” he says, “is a form of self-exploitation that serves the purpose of increasing productivity,” which “produces only variations of the same” (10)—and inevitably, therefore, more fear.
L’avenir, however, is not subject to the compulsions of self-creation—it gestures, instead, towards something “something radically different” (9). Whereas fear has this individualizing function—it privatizes and psychologizes, making us “entrepreneurs of ourselves” (9)—hope has a communalizing function—it opens and spreads, transforming isolated Is into a collective We. Ironically, the attitude of mastery towards the future is constraining; it makes us feel “cornered” and “imprisoned” (3); in controlling the future, we block anything new from emerging. The hopeful don’t desire such control: “to be free means to be free of compulsion” (9). For the hopeful, the future is l’avenir, which is situated at this what-you-don’t-yet-know: “an unavailable space of possibility” (7). “The temporal mode of hope,” Han argues, “is not-yet. […] It is a spiritual attitude, a spiritual mood, that elevates us above what is already there” (7).
The spirit of hope, then, is associated with a spirit of risk. Indeed, “we confront a bleak future” (2), but this bleakness tends to cultivate a spirit of survival that Han sharply criticizes: “[a]mid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers” (2). For example, Han draws attention to climate activists who “openly admit they are ‘afraid of the future.’ Fear,” he suggests, “deprives them of their future.” Han, of course, doesn’t “deny that climate fear is justified,” but stresses rather that “the pervasive climate of fear is [also] a cause for concern” (3). Alternatively, “[h]ope presents us with a future” (2)—a risky future.
Risk is central to Han’s emphatic remarks that hope is neither reducible to optimism nor the tenets of positive psychology. For optimists, the future is accessible and riskless. In this sense, optimism is akin to fear—both “do not reckon with the unexpected or incalculable” (5). Although optimism and pessimism are often seen as opposites—the former insistent that everything will turn out, the latter just as insistent that everything is lost—Han argues that they share a common structure insofar as they “cannot conceive of an event that would constitute a surprising twist to the way things are going” (6). Moreover, whereas hope is tied to action, and “[a]ction is always associated with risk,” optimists don’t “properly act” because they don’t “take risks” (6). Hope fully confronts the risk of the other, tarrying with what Han calls “negativity.” “Unlike hope, optimism lacks negativity” (5). As does positive psychology, which turns away from what Martin Seligman, one of the founders of the movement, describes as the “negative focus” of psychology. Hope, however, lingers with suffering, pain, and hopelessness. In reference to Pandora’s box, Han craftily cites Nietzsche to make his point: “For what Zeus wanted was that man, however much tormented by other evils, should nonetheless not throw life away but continue to let himself be tormented. To that end he gives men hope” (18). “Hope is a dialectical figure” (4).
The repetitive form of Han’s text is demonstrative of an ethics of “onward striving.” Han repeats because he’s committed—committed to the lastingness that is so central to his work, as well as its effect on his readership. Indeed, this onward striving is energized by the spirit of hope. If, as he argues, à la Gabriel Marcel, “to hope means ‘to spread hope’” (14), then Han’s text itself spreads hope, and resembles Hegel’s “brave mole of history who confidently digs tunnels endlessly through the darkness” (8). “It keeps working away amid darkness” (9): “the bright light of hope feeds off the deepest darkness” (39).
This dialectic of hope not only lies at the heart of Han’s theory, translated from the German by Daniel Steuer, but is also captured in Anselm Kiefer’s illustrations, included in Polity’s 2024 hardcover publication. Eight of the renowned German painter and sculptor’s desolate and apocalyptic works, which span a variety of years, exhibitions, locations, and media, are interspersed throughout the text. Unpeopled, each of them glows with forsakenness on a biblical scale—both in the size of the installations themselves and in the way mysterious darkness and holy lightness converge. Although some of its sublimity is lost in the downsized printed photographs of Georges Poncet chosen for the text, they still offer what Han calls hope’s “contemplative” dimension, stopping the reader in their tracks, getting them to “lean forward and listen attentively” (5). In other words, Kiefer provides the conditions for the viewer “to reckon with the unexpected or incalculable” (5). The stirring marriage of Kiefer’s aesthetics and Han’s philosophy is built on this “fundamental mood” (81): hope lies somewhere in between art and wisdom—equally as unsure as it is sure. “Only in the deepest despair does true hope arise” (4).
The relationship Han constructs between hope and anxiety further expresses this dialectic. Although “the precise opposite of anxiety, hope structurally resembles it” (71), he claims. We are not anxious of something; anxiety is objectless; it comes upon us—before language and experience—as an existential mood that “can ambush, capture and transform us” (25). The question is: must this mood be anxiety? Here, Han responds to Heidegger by suggesting an existential analysis based “on hope rather than anxiety.” Whereas “[a]nxiety radically narrows the field of possibilities” (78), hope widens them. But we are also not hopeful of something. Like anxiety, “hope is without an object” (71), and is, therefore, to be sharply distinguished from expectations or wishes, which “are bound up with an object or a worldly event.” “Hope,” Han tells us, “is independent of how things will end” (81). Although it readies us for the future, hope never arrives there. “Not-arriving is the fundamental trait of absolute hope” (42).
The temporal discrepancy Han demarcates between night-dreams—which “reveal the past” (29)—and daydreams—which “depict what is coming” (29)—also figures strongly in Kiefer’s art: the darkness of coming to terms with the horrors of German fascism confronts a spiritual “premonition of a higher truth.” The theory, like the art, is destitute and numinous, despondent and divine. “Beauty, as a medium of hope that is located beyond all profane purposive rationality, illumines a possible world beyond what exists” (63).
We continue to let ourselves be tormented not because of some future promise–hope is rendered superfluous by promises and contracts (36),–nor because we are “bound up with any concrete article of faith” (81), but rather because hope “is a force, a momentum” (23). An elementary question to ask of Han, of course, is the question of agency: how do we create this momentum, how do we bring about a “politics of hope that creates an atmosphere of hope against the regime of fear” (14)? If “[t]he spirit of hope inspires action” (35), then, on Han’s view, we are left waiting to be touched by the spirit. This, I think, is precisely his point, and it’s one that reveals our cultural elevation of action over contemplation, which this question assumes. But “hope does not circle around the self.” “The fundamental formula of hope is ‘to rely on’” (83). As Daniel Steuer notes, “[t]he German for ‘to rely on’ is ‘Sich-verlassen-auf.’ The italics hint at hope involving a trust that allows one to leave oneself behind and rely on something or someone outside oneself” (97n27). In short, we do not bring about hope—hope brings about us. Indeed, “[h]ope is a catalyst for writing” (40) that moves through him, and that now moves through me. In this way, the text stages this reliance.
Like the trinity of hope, faith, and love, this text holds all three within its pages. “All three are turned towards the other. Those who hope, love[,] or believe devote themselves to the other; they transcend the immanence of the self”; they “move beyond themselves” (83) “in the face of total hopelessness” (42). There is no clearly discernible alternative in The Spirit of Hope, and yet we persist. “Absolute hope is a hopeless hope” (42).
The painting that dons the cover of the text is titled in homage to Venetian philosopher, Andrea Emo: “These writings, when burnt, will finally give some light.” The paradise of ruins it depicts is cut in two by a rickety, redemptive ladder. This same painting stretches between pages 12 and 13. The ladder, however, is obscured by the spine of the book. A reader could easily miss it. The hope, represented by the ladder, precedes us, even as it’s hidden from view; it inspires us to spread open these pages—to climb it with no guarantees. “To live means to hope” (22).
Hope calls us to be ready. Han maintains that “The conventional criticism of hope ignores its complexity and inner tensions” (23). By fully embracing messiness, he gives us hope that hope, too, can be our mood, in an increasingly hopeless world: the light visible only in the darkness.
The sentences in The Spirit of Hope, like many of Han’s pithy and packed prose demand as much of our hearts as they do of our minds. His style softens the sharp edges of our thinking while remaining incisive and cutting, his words beg to be underlined and internalized, and his ideas will be appreciated not only by students and teachers of the humanities, but by anyone wrestling with the horrors of this world. It is a text that is not only a critical companion, but a spiritual one.