On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays

a willingness to be agents in shaping their lives. The world beckons to each one of us, challenging us to ply our talents and carve our own paths. As the existential philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl discovered during his World War II concentration camp internment, it is our voluntary action, and not what we’re forced to do, that determine

Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. may have understood American Protestantism better than anyone. By staging resistance at the center of ordinary life (again on buses and at diners), he revealed an overwhelming lack of flourishing.

Societies shape ways of thinking and feeling, which in turn shape how societies function—whether through damage and violence or through habits of collaboration and tolerance. But there is no reliable theory which can tell us which shifts in the present may presage the future.2 We may have to try to feel and sense them rather than deducing them.

As citizens, he argued, we need two essential moral “powers” or “capacities.” First, the “capacity for a conception of the good”—in other words, the ability to reflect on and pursue our own idea of how we want to live. Second, the “capacity for a sense of justice”—the ability to form our own view about how we should organize society, and to coopera