Hopelessness as a Virtue

What is hope? Hope is commonly presented as a feeling—an expectation regarding a future that instills a sense of gladness. Whatever happens, things will somehow turn out well. Who would fail to appreciate being offered something that is hopeful? Yet the person who extends hope does not do so on the basis of some superior knowledge about what awaits another; rather, hope is a gesture of support, a performative speech act. By offering hope, one becomes implicated in a future that remains uncertain and uncontrollable for the recipient. In this sense, hope qualifies as a virtue: an attitude that promotes the good, as a classical Thomistic definition would have it. In Christian theology, too, hope is esteemed as a theological virtue. “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love,” so Paul declares in one of his letters (1 Cor. 13). Although love is the greatest of these, all three are framed within an eschatological horizon of redemption, marking a fundamental characteristic of Christian belief.

Still, one may question whether hope deserves such a distinguished religious status. Does hope, in fact, produce the good? A contrarian perspective is warranted—if only because hope itself contains something inherently paradoxical: it posits a reality that is not yet present. And precisely this imaginative projection entails responsibility when we offer hope to those living in circumstances where the desired reality is almost unattainable. Do malignant problems truly merit our hope, or do they require something different altogether?

Hope is dangerous. However comforting, optimistic, or well-intentioned hope may appear, it harbors an equally concealed and darker dimension. Hope corrodes the humanity of individuals forced to live in situations where malignant problems define their lifeworld. Hannah Arendt quotes the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote about his time as a political prisoner in Auschwitz: “Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers.”¹ Borowski died by suicide, kneeling before his gas stove only days after the birth of his daughter. Such tragedy reveals the long reach and scalding breath of evil.

Arendt is well known for her analysis of the banality of evil: the refusal to think critically about one’s actions, which renders moral judgment irrelevant. She saw this banality manifested in the Eichmann trial, where the perpetrator displayed neither guilt nor hatred. He simply carried out his duties as prescribed, without questioning the thoughtlessness with which he fulfilled them. Evil emerges in the unreflective compliance with the commands of totalitarian regimes. Banal is the habit of disassociating oneself from the surrounding evil; more troubling still is the possibility of experiencing evil as a vocation, for its challenge—devoid of moral appeal—may be as enticing as the pursuit of peace and tolerance. Equally banal is the inconspicuousness of evil as one among many permissible life-forms, provoking little public scrutiny or debate. In such cases evil becomes a personal lifestyle, a social habit alongside others. Hope offers no remedy for evil; instead, it leaves evil intact by relocating alternatives to an imagined future and thereby obscuring the reality of evil in the present.

Arendt also addresses the radicality of evil, which she associates with totalitarianism—particularly its political manifestations in Nazism and Stalinism that marked the time and age in which he lived. Such systems seek control over public and private life alike, suppressing all opposition. Yet evil is not merely a political project. What makes evil radical is the violation it inflicts on those who endure it. Totalitarianism deprives people of the freedom to experience the world differently from what the system dictates. It assaults human dignity by forbidding and erasing the capacity to find meaning in what is other—ideally along with the individuals who introduce such difference. Totalitarianism aspires to remake the human being as a mirror of the system itself. Fear naturally follows, and compliance inevitably develops. Hope becomes the futile antidote to that fear: an “antidote” because it distracts, and “futile” because it misleads.

This is well represented by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod who captures this paradox in his account of Pandora. She was said to be entrusted by a jar that held all evils of humanity. Upon opening the jar, she released these misfortunes into the world; startled, she closed it prematurely, however leaving hope behind. Hope is therefore not the alternative to misfortune but one of its expressions. In philosophy as well, hope is an uneasy concept—a fatal confusion of desire and probability. Schopenhauer calls hope “a folly of the heart, which so confuses the intellect in its judgment of what is probable that it takes one chance in a thousand as a promising possibility.”² Arendt is perhaps less pessimistic. In Men in Dark Times (1968), she distinguishes hope from naïve optimism, though she does so not conceptually but through biographical sketches of such figures as Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Jaspers, and Walter Benjamin, all of whom resisted the conformism of their time. Yet we might question whether such exemplary figures, testifying to a surplus of moral courage at the personal level, can adequately respond to the “mass loneliness” experienced by those threatened by totalitarian regimes.

Arendt’s critique of hope is more deeply rooted in her understanding of the relationship between time and action. She challenges the teleological orientation that has shaped much of Western thought: the notion that the course of time corresponds to a rational or predetermined plan. Salvation, in this framework, belongs to the future rather than the present. This projection of redemption into the future has a long intellectual history. Augustine, for instance, situates divine salvation at the end of time, within an eschatological vision that elevates hope to an extraordinary category. German idealism, especially Hegel, is likewise indebted to an idea of liberation that unfolds only through history’s dialectical—and therefore agonizing—ordeals, culminating far in the future. Even modern faith in technological and welfare progress constructs the better world as something perpetually ahead, only ostensibly within our control. None of this aligns with Arendt’s perspective.

In Between Past and Future (1961), Arendt speaks of the gap between past and future that we struggle to bridge. This gap is not, for her, an empty or ungraspable instant; it is a privileged public space for speaking and acting. It is the moment in which freedom becomes perceptible: the freedom to judge the past and act toward the future. The present—the now—liberates us from the contingencies of past and future alike. We know the past but cannot alter it; we can influence the future but cannot know it. The indivisible moment of the present serves as the hinge between these two contingencies, an opening in time that calls us to assume responsibility for the human condition. By refusing to fear or evade this dual contingency, we escape the determinism that would otherwise strip us of our freedom.

In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt uses the evocative term “natality,” which recurs throughout her work. Natality designates both the fact of having been born and the human capacity to begin anew. The first refers to a biological universal; the second to the distinctively human condition of action—the intentional intervention into the course of events—which Arendt distinguishes from behavior governed by routine or convention. This distinction is central for her: natality concerns the initiative taken by free, unique, and unrepeatable beings who express their humanity through such acts. Humanity, in this most general sense, depends on the continual emergence of new persons—distinct actors who test their freedom in ever-changing circumstances. Natality stands in tension with hope, for it focuses on the immediacy of action rather than deferring meaning to a not-yet future. Without resolving ontological questions, Arendt uses natality to emphasize that although we are mortal, we are also confronted with the incessant newness of each moment. In doing so she distances herself from her teacher and former lover Martin Heidegger, for whom death—the horizon of life—served as a central philosophical parameter. Arendt does not privilege a retrospective view from a future endpoint; instead, she affirms the unpredictability of emerging time and the responsibility to shape it.

Although Arendt showed little interest in spirituality or mysticism and did not consider herself religious. She was Jewish and accepted this as her fate that significantly shaped her thought. Explicit theological concerns, however, are sparse. Nonetheless, her dissertation Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (1929) contains themes that foreshadow her later account of natality. Augustine defines love as a motivating force of the will. Arendt adopts the intentional dimension of this idea but shifts the focus away from Augustine’s emphasis on God’s orientation toward humanity—the that of love—and toward the what and how of love. Thus, she highlights a principle of moral ordering, in which one continually evaluates what is better or worse. Love is not a fixed attribute but a practice requiring ongoing discernment. Arendt rejects Augustine’s hierarchy that elevates love of God (caritas) above love of the world (amor mundi). Instead, she underscores Augustine’s use of the Latin term for renewal, initium: Ut ergo esset initium, creatus est homo (“Thus, in order that there might be a beginning, the human being was created”).³ With each physical birth, creation begins anew. A human being enters the world endowed with political capacities and therefore with no need to fear nor to hope.

Arendt’s suspicion of transcendence prevents us from attributing religious convictions to her. Yet, with some interpretive generosity, we might imagine her saying something like: “Do not turn God into a utopia, but into a witness of our freedom to act in His name. Grant Him the time to break in—here and now.” Such an orientation requires neither retreat into interiority, nor nostalgia for tradition, nor longing for the future, but rather an embrace of the contingencies that accompany the freedom renewed with each birth. If so, then perhaps hopelessness is the virtue we ought most urgently to cultivate.

1. Arendt, H. (1964). ‘The Destruction of Six Million’. Jewish World. Reprinted in Jewish Writings, Schocken, 2007. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. 490–496. ↩︎
2. Schopenhauer, A. (1851). Parerga und Paralipomena. II, Einige Psychologische Bemerkungen, Werke V, par 313, p 688. ↩︎
3. Augustine. De Civitate Dei, Book XII, chapter 20.  ↩︎