The day my students stopped me in my tracks – and changed how I thought about hope

Lea Ypi: ‘Being hopeful is about preserving the right principle, based on which a moral world makes sense.’ Photograph: Florian Thoss/The Guardian

The moment of 2023 that gave me hope was one in which I thought all hope was lost. It was a Friday morning, in the middle of October, and I had just started exploring with my students Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay, What Is Enlightenment?

Most people tend to think of hope as an attitude that sits somewhere between a desire and a belief: a desire for a certain outcome and the belief that something favours its realisation. We look for evidence in the world to see if it conforms to our wishes, and if we find it we have hope; otherwise, not.