Hope, the secret weapon of philosopher Byung-Chul Han

It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

The hopeful element in the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted; but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied.

Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.