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.
But for me hope means something different. Being hopeful has nothing to do with how the world goes. It’s a kind of duty, a necessary complement to morality. What is the point of trying to do the right thing if we have no reason to think others do the same? What is the point of holding others responsible if we think responsibility is beyond their capacity?
Hope is the opposite of nihilism. Paradoxically, the worse the world goes, the more hopeful you must remain to be able to continue fighting. Being hopeful is not about guaranteeing the right outcome but preserving the right principle: the principle based on which a moral world makes sense.
So what did it mean, in my case, to lose hope? It meant to lose faith in that principle. There I was, in my class on the history of political thought, discussing the motto of the Enlightenment, sapere aude (dare to be wise), and exploring why Kant defines it as the “emergence from human beings’ self-incurred immaturity”. To think for yourself, to think of putting yourself in the shoes of everyone else, and to always think consistently: these are the principles of enlightened thinking, I said to the students, and they are not as abstract as they seem, nor as individualistic or wedded to the status quo. On the contrary, they are crucial to filling the gap between the world in which we live and the one we have a responsibility to build.
But I could see them rolling their eyes. That all sounds lovely, one of my students finally mustered the courage to say. Kant was lucky to live in the age of the Enlightenment – at least people liked this sort of thing then. Another pointed out that in the 18th century there were no algorithms, no social media, and no echo chambers, and it was, therefore, still possible to believe in enlightenment through public discourse. A third student, this time from the Balkans, chimed in. What had the Enlightenment ever done for us, she said, if it wasn’t even able to help us stop genocide?
I looked away from my PowerPoint slides and through the window, and everything I had said up to that point sounded ridiculous. There was such a gap between the world I read about, taught and believed in, and the one in which I lived. Every morning, I checked my social media, trying to make sense of the news, and all I could find were efforts to convince the world that killing innocent civilians is sometimes, for some people, under some conditions, acceptable. Was I mad for holding on to this maxim of enlarged and consistent thinking, and the criticism of double standards that followed from it? Was it so absurd to believe that, at some level, politics can remain accountable to morality?
It is not that I had never asked myself these questions before. It’s more that every time they came up, I reminded myself of the moral duty to hope. But this time it didn’t work. I had lost faith in reason, and my words had lost the power to make sense, even to myself.
How did I recover? I tried to remind myself of my particular standpoint in the world. And how my existential despair, my philosophical dilemmas and my questions reflected my privilege. The people who suffer from injustice, who withstand daily insults to their dignity, who are marginalised, silenced, exploited, left to die or killed cannot afford to ask themselves if they have hope. They cling on to life, they try to cope, they fight. Their continuing struggle, whatever form it takes, cannot afford the loss of faith. The least the rest of us can do is to avoid questioning the grounds for hope, indulging ourselves even more. Perhaps this is the real political meaning of the Enlightenment: whether there is hope or not is only a relevant question for those who have the privilege to doubt it. That is a small fraction of the world.
• Lea Ypi is a professor in political theory in the government department at the London School of Economics
