Hope from Despair*

The public discourse on climate change has long centred around hope-based narratives pushed by both the media and mainstream environmentalist agents from Greenpeace and WWF to Bill Gates and Al Gore.1 The promises of scientific and technological advance in particular, they argue, give us reason to be hopeful that it is in our hands to halt the incipient climate catastrophe. We just need to roll up our sleeves and get on with it.

In the face of humanity’s apparent inability—on display most recently at COP26 in Glasgow—to adopt the ‘rapid and far-reaching changes in all aspects of society’ required to at least keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C,2 this narrative has come under pressure. More radical climate activists make the case for an affective shift away from hope in the face of global warming towards darker attitudes such as anger, panic, or fear, or, most surprisingly perhaps, despair. The activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has arguably been the most vocal in their call for hope to ‘die’.3 Hope, they worry, obscures the truth about global warming as the single largest existential threat to the planet and hampers the kind of radical action that would be required at least to rein in its consequences. ‘In facing our climate predicament’, they argue, ‘there is no way to escape despair'.4

Reactions have been mixed, both from within and beyond the climate movement. While some fellow activists express enthusiasm about an explicit invocation of despair,5 others worry about its potentially stifling and depoliticizing effects on the public. According to the American scientist Michael Mann, the rhetoric of despair ‘is in many ways as pernicious as outright climate change denial, for it leads us down the same path of inaction’;6 writer and activist George Monbiot even considers succumbing to despair to be a moral failure.7 In the media, XR are frequently portrayed as the ‘eccentric and dangerous merchants of despair’.8

This discursive backlash chimes with a philosophical scepticism about despair that is both widespread and long-standing. According to Euripides’ Amphitryon, despair is the ‘mark of a worthless man’;9 Aquinas considers it ‘the greatest of sins’;10 Kant’s greatest worry is that we might ‘succumb to despair’ in the face of moral obligation;11 Charles Peirce equates despair with insanity.12 And contemporary philosophers juxtapose celebratory accounts of hope as a motivation and source of grit with a view of despair as unproductive, impotent, or nihilistic. Despairing agents, they argue, should either give up on the relevant end or cultivate an attitude, such as hope, that strengthens their resolve rather than undermining it.13 Unsurprisingly, political philosophers tend to agree that ‘a hopeful politics, one based upon a vision of generalized global prosperity and sustainability, best addresses the problems of climate change’.14

The aim of this article is to withstand this wholehearted rejection of despair in philosophical and public discourse alike. I shall argue that a specific form of despair that I call episodic has an important role to play in our practical and particularly in our political lives.15 In guarding against certain pitfalls of false hope, episodic despair can help us to hope (and ultimately act) well. Against this background, I propose to understand XR activists not as asking us to reject or give up hope, but as aspiring to a more robust and realistic kind of hope, which arises from despair.

Before I can make good on this idea, some conceptual ground-clearing is in order. I start by defining episodic despair in contrast, yet closely related, to hope (Section I). An agent who experiences episodic despair is unable to imaginatively close the gap between themselves and a desired future, such that the unlikeliness of the outcome, rather than its possibility, is salient. In Section II, I argue that rational or justified hope requires a complex trade-off between various epistemic and practical considerations that is often difficult to come by precisely from within a hopeful stance. There is thus an inherent risk that hope will degenerate into wishful thinking, complacency, or fixation. In Section III, I draw on claims and statements from XR members (as well as fellow radical climate activists) in order to illustrate how episodic despair can guard against these dangers. As a deliberative corrective, episodic despair can help us to realistically assess the empirical circumstances (III.A), to act in courageous and creative ways (III.B), and to critically reflect on our ends and available alternatives (III.C). However, despair that persists rather than resulting in new and different kinds of hope is fatal, too (Section IV): in destroying our basic underlying sense that the future is open to our intervention (our fundamental hope), it undermines practical agency as such. Hence we should be careful not to play hope and despair off against each other.

Despair has not received much attention in Western philosophy, at least within the broadly analytic tradition; its details therefore remain underexplored.16 Wherever mentioned, it is scolded and rejected. In the present section, I will take my cue from the recently burgeoning debates about the nature of hope in order to get a grip on that to which it is usually thought to be the antidote: despair.

Given the multifaceted role hope plays in our lives, it is hardly surprising that philosophers struggle to provide a unified definition of the phenomenon. According to the so-called ‘orthodox definition’,17 hope is a compound state that combines a desire that p with a belief, or at least a presupposition, that p is possible but not certain.18 Hope’s cognitive element distinguishes it from modally less constrained wishes on the one hand (I can arguably wish, though not hope, to fly away simply by flapping my arms) and more confident expectations on the other. Its conative element captures the fact that a hoping person takes a pro-attitude towards the hoped-for object.

It may well be the case that some of our more superficial and mundane hopes can be defined along these lines: for instance, my hope that there will be apple pie for dessert or that the train will arrive on time. However, the orthodox definition arguably cannot account for hope in its most complete or paradigmatic form, sometimes referred to as ‘substantial hope’,19 where the stakes are high, but the probability is low: for instance, my hope for recovery from a serious illness or to have a successful career in academia. These hopes command our attention, thus playing a particularly prominent role in structuring and shaping our thoughts and actions, in ways that go beyond the mere belief-desire combination.

This problem comes to the fore most clearly in the orthodox definition’s inability to distinguish between hope and despair. Notice that two people who equally desire an outcome and believe in its possibility may nonetheless differ with regard to their affective outlook. Take Luc Bovens’s by-now iconic example (based on Frank Darabont’s film The Shawshank Redemption) of Andy and Red, two prisoners serving a life sentence for murder.20 They both desire to be free and believe that there is a (small) chance they will be able to escape. Yet, while Andy hopes to get out, Red despairs of the low odds.

Hence much of the recent debate has focused on identifying a third component (in addition to belief and desire) that would allow us to distinguish hope from despair. Instead of committing to one specific among the countless proposals,21 I would like to crystallize what I take to be the shared idea underlying most of them: that hopeful and despairing agents differ in the way they relate to, ‘attend to’,22 or ‘perceive’23 the possibility of the desired outcome. The latter looks at the situation and says, ‘I grant you it is possible, but the chance is only one in a thousand!’, while the former says, ‘I grant you the chance is only one in a thousand, but it is possible!’.24 It seems that for the hopeful agent the possibility of the desired outcome is salient or in the foreground, rather than its unlikeliness.

The imagination appears to play a crucial role in explaining what accounts for this gestalt shift.25 According to Bovens, for instance, in hoping we ‘mentally image’ what it would be like if the desired state of the world were to materialize.26 Cheshire Calhoun takes hope to include a ‘phenomenological idea of the determinate future whose content includes success’, that is, ‘we previsage a particular future in our imagination’.27 Most explicitly, perhaps, Jack Kwong argues that a hopeful person is able, by exercising her creativity and imagination, to see (that is, to visualize in her mind) a way in which the desired outcome can come about, and she sees the way as a genuine possibility.28

This framework allows us to define despair in contrast to this particular kind of (substantial) hope. Like the hopeful agent, the despairing agent experiences a gap between themselves and the desired outcome. In contrast, however, they cannot mentally close this gap by visualizing what it would be like or how we might get there. This also helps us understand why, in cases where the attainment of the hoped-for object depends on our own contribution (which I will primarily be concerned with),29 hope helps sustain our resolve or what is now often called ‘grit’,30 while despair potentially undermines it. The hopeful agent’s ability to imaginatively inhabit the desired future or project themselves into it stabilizes and structures their connection to that outcome. By contrast, the agent who despairs because they cannot see a way forward is disposed to give up on it.

In a specific sense, I conceive of hope and despair not just as mutually exclusive antagonists,31 but also as jointly exhaustive. For in the kind of high-stakes scenarios I have in mind, agents necessarily attend to the desire in some way—mental or affective abstention is not an option. In other words, the circumstances are such that we conceive of a desired outcome either from the perspective of its possibility or its unlikeliness. This will be important to keep in mind as I develop the idea that despair is not just a tonic against false hope, but (thereby) helps us to cultivate warranted hope.

I should add that I take myself to have defined a particular kind of despair, which I call episodic. I do so primarily to demarcate it from what I refer to (and discuss in more detail in Section IV) as fundamental despair: a general state of hopelessness, where all sense of agency is lost and the future in general is conceived as already determined. Along these lines, Anthony Steinbock describes despair as an ‘utter loss of any ground of hope’, as the ‘experience of abandonment as ultimate and decisive’.32 Episodic despair differs not only in that it is propositional or intentional—we despair over or of something—but it also leaves open the possibility of regaining or redirecting our hope at any point. For, while we cannot experience hope and despair at the same time, the two are closely related, differing only in how the agent relates to a desired yet unlikely outcome. Indeed, agents often find themselves oscillating between the two—depending on whether, at any one moment, the possibility or the unlikeliness is in the foreground.

Notice also that episodic despair differs from what I call resignative despair: that is, a desire for a state of affairs combined with the belief that it is impossible. This notion is widespread in discussions of despair. According to Han-Pile and Stern, for instance, ‘the despairing person keeps desiring the good but without being able to act to bring it about because they think it is unobtainable, or that it cannot obtain on its own’.33 Despair, on this view, is experienced as a kind of painful longing for the impossible that goes along with a sense of frustration and inner conflict. This attitude, they quite plausibly argue, is irrational; if I was hoping to have sea bass at my favourite restaurant, but it turns out there were none at the market today, I should (as a matter of rational consistency) not despair, but simply order something else.34 Episodic despair differs from resignative despair in that it retains a belief in possibility, such that it is not necessarily irrational. That, of course, leaves open the question what, if any, value it has for our practical lives. To answer this question, I turn from the nature of hope to its norms.

I have provided a definition of episodic despair as the antonym of (substantial) hope. In contrast to the hopeful agent, the despairing agent is presently unable to imaginatively close the gap between themselves and the hoped-for future, such that its unlikeliness is in the foreground rather than its possibility. My claim in the remainder of this article will be that this kind of despair can help us to hope well: that is, to cultivate rational or justified hope by guarding against certain dangers of false hope.35

To prepare the ground for this argument, I first need to explain what it means to hope well. To start with, it is not at all obvious that hope is the kind of mental state that is responsive to reasons and thus open to rational assessment in the first place. In fact, in the history of philosophy, hope has often been conceived as a passion or affect and hence as something fundamentally noncognitive. At this point, suffice it to point out that our communicative practices around hope are highly evaluative: we ask each other to give reasons for our hope, we laud each other for ‘courageous’ or ‘resilient’ hopes, we criticize ‘careless’ or ‘empty’ hopes.36 Notice that to say that we can deliberate about the justification or rationality of hope does not commit us to say that we can will ourselves to have or give up hope in every or even most circumstances.37 Hope shares this feature with emotions such as anger,38 which can be more or less fitting or apt independently of whether they are under our direct voluntary control.

In investigating the norms of hope, we can take our cue from the observation made in the preceding section that hope, in representing its object as possible and desirable, contains both cognitive and conative elements. From this it follows that hope is subject to both epistemic and practical norms. The former concern the belief component: for hope to be epistemically rational or justified, we must be justified in believing that the desired outcome is neither impossible nor certain. I would like to suggest that beyond that, though, there is no single epistemic threshold for hope. That is to say, it is not per se irrational or misplaced to hope for outcomes that are highly unlikely.39 While evidence indicating that the desired outcome may be out of reach gives us a reason against hope, we may still have warrant to hope for it all things considered—for instance, because we are highly invested in it,40 muster little mental energy, or if there are simply no available alternatives. These are scenarios where the opportunity costs of hoping tend to be low.

Hence, what matters from an epistemic perspective is that a hope is based on a justified probability assessment.41 For instance, prisoner Andy (see above) is epistemically justified in hoping to escape as long as his belief about the odds of succeeding is justified given the available evidence. Darrel Moellendorf calls this a pragmatic approach to the epistemic standards of hope, according to which ‘different hopes might be warranted under different factual and evidential scenarios depending on the circumstances, and those circumstances might depend on some sort of pragmatic, cost/benefit, calculation regarding hoping’.42

In the practical domain, we have to distinguish between moral and strategic norms. On the one hand, given that hope commits us to the goodness of its object, we can ask whether it is rational or justified given the demands of morality (whatever those are taken to be). That is to say, we should not hope for what is bad or immoral. Adapting an example from Luc Bovens, a car-racing enthusiast with a secret desire to witness an accident should not hope for this to happen: that is (on Bovens’s specific account of what it is to hope), ‘devot[e] much mental energy to what it would be like if such and such accident were to occur … the stories I would be able to tell my friends, etc.’.43

When it comes to strategic norms, on the other hand, we have to further distinguish two kinds of questions. First, we can ask whether hope makes the attainment of a particular (permissible) desire more likely. Ideally, hope motivates us to sustain our pursuits in difficult circumstances where the prospects of success are dim.44 Yet, this presupposes an accurate understanding of the relation between our own contribution and external circumstances such as luck, environmental conditions, or the agency of other people. Notice that hope (of the practical kind I am interested in) is characterized by a distinct combination of agency and vulnerability. While success depends on my contribution, it is not fully within my hands: if I could simply act so as to bring about the desired outcome, I would not need to hope. In hoping, that is to say, we ‘actively engag[e] with our own current limitations in affecting the future we want to inhabit’.45 Justified hope successfully navigates this tension, neither overestimating our own power nor overly relying on factors beyond our control.

However, we cannot leave it there. Importantly, a second set of strategic norms concerns the conduciveness of a particular hope to our (permissible) ends more generally; this is a matter not of securing, but rather of selecting our ends. In this context, it is particularly important to keep in mind that hope has opportunity costs. As we invest mental energy in a particular object, we potentially forgo or lose sight of alternative paths. For instance, ‘imagine a political activist who might reject attainable, modest, but real reforms because these would take away from planning and building support for some even better and more thorough-going, but far less likely, change’.46 For a hope to be justified in this respect, its benefits must outweigh the opportunity costs.47 In order to make this assessment and remain aware of ‘what is lost’ when we hope for a given object, we need to constantly monitor the wider practical landscape including any available alternatives.

To sum up, a hope is justified if (1) it is based on an accurate probability estimate, (2) helps us realize a (permissible) end, and (3) advances our (permissible) ends more generally. Hoping well, that is to say, requires a constant triangulation between ourselves, our ends, and the wider epistemic and practical circumstances. Now, I want to suggest that, somewhat paradoxically, this trade-off is particularly difficult to come by from within a hopeful stance itself. For hope is essentially a way of focusing on or zooming in on (the possibility of) a particular outcome—of blinding out, by way of the imagination, detrimental evidence and alternative paths. Hoping well, however, requires precisely the ability to zoom out and align our ends with various epistemic and practical considerations. This is why there is an inherent risk for hope to degenerate into false hope: hopeful agents may be disposed to wrongly estimate the likeliness of the outcome, to overly rely on external factors, or to be blind to alternative, more realistic goals. As I hope to show in the next section, episodic despair can thus function as a corrective on hope that guards against these dangers.

In conjunction, my claims in Sections I (concerning the nature of hope) and II (concerning the norms of hope) yield a predicament: hope itself may complicate the trade-off between various epistemic and practical considerations that is needed for justified or rational hope. In this section, I propose to read XR’s call for despair as responding to this predicament. Despair can guard against wishful thinking, complacency, and fixation—three forms or expressions of false hope, which they diagnose in our relation to the climate crisis. Ultimately, it can help us to hope well.

In the preceding section, I outlined three ways in which episodic despair can guard against the dangers of false hope by checking it against the wider epistemic and practical landscape. The hope that arises from despair is more robust and less likely to degenerate into wishful thinking, complacency, and fixation. Sometimes we have to go through despair, that is to say, in order to hope well. As the XR handbook puts it, ‘there is a lot that people can gain from … despairing before then piecing things back together for themselves’.87 Against my partial defence of despair up to this point, the present section takes a more cautionary direction. I highlight that the justification of despair is conditional and instrumental; that it is valuable only insofar as and to the extent that it helps us to hope well. Despair must indeed dissolve into hope if it is not to have precisely those stifling and paralysing effects so often attributed to it.

To see this, we must ask what it is that enables us to overcome despair and find new hope. I want to suggest that it is a deeper, more basic kind of hope that I call fundamental hope. In contrast to the propositional hopes of the form hope that p I have focused on up to this point, fundamental hope is not directed at a specific object.88 Instead, it is a ‘pre-intentional’ orientation or ‘existential feeling’,89 an anticipatory stance that represents the future as ‘sufficiently hospitable to our agential efforts’.90

While fundamental hope arguably plays a prominent role in thinkers from a more continental background, such as Gabriel Marcel or Ernst Bloch, in contemporary debate it is usually Jonathan Lear who is credited with first conceptualizing a version of it that he labels ‘radical’. I have referred above to Lear’s discussion of the Crow Nation, who find themselves in a state of cultural devastation as their system of meanings collapses. Lear argues that it is radical hope which allows Plenty Coups to anticipate ‘the possibility of new Crow possibilities’.91 This is a kind of hope that is directed ‘toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is’; it anticipates ‘a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it’.92

Lear is usually read as suggesting that radical hope is something agents summon up when they lack any propositional hope. By contrast, what I call fundamental hope is an ‘experiential backdrop’93 that sits beneath all our specific hopes; only against the background of this general orientation or sense of how things are with the world do particular hopes become intelligible. As long as we retain fundamental hope, even though some or even all propositional hopes are lost, there is a prospect that, through creativity and imagination, we may fill this general sense of openness with concrete objects.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that climate ethicists have pointed to the importance of fundamental hope in the face of the radically uncertain future caused by climate change. Allen Thompson,94 for instance, takes his cue from Lear’s work in arguing that we currently lack the concepts that would allow us to make sense of what it would mean to live well in a warmer world, or how we could overcome the culture of material consumption, with its attendant expectations of comfort and convenience, that have set us on this path. As a climate activist from Kiribati, whose islands are at risk of becoming uninhabitable, puts it: ‘I feel hopeless in one way that our people are suffering, but I also have the hope that they will try to find a way to adapt’.95

So there certainly is a sense in which fundamental hope is more robust or resilient against disappointment than propositional hope; no one specific set of facts or piece of evidence is able to destroy our sense of the future as open to our intervention. I do not think, though, that it is entirely ‘immune to empirical disappointment’.96 Our interest in the future generally, at least occasionally, has to manifest itself as an interest in particular future outcomes. If over a prolonged period of time, there is nothing at all we can pin our hope to, even fundamental hope is in peril. Katie Stockdale has recently argued that this happens to groups living under oppression, for instance in conditions of poverty, colonialism, racism, and sexism. At some point, they are going to lose the very sense that their actions make any difference or that the future is not yet determined.97

I would like to suggest that, in this case, fundamental hope itself is lost and turns into what I call fundamental despair: an existential feeling that is directed at the world as a whole; a loss of all meaning, where our entire temporal horizon breaks down.98 In analogy to fundamental hope and in contrast to episodic despair, we do not despair of or over something, but find ourselves in a—much deeper and consequential—state of being in despair: a sense that nothing we do makes any difference and the world is closed off to our intervention. According to Steinbock, in this condition our loss of hope is so profound that we even lack a sense of what has been lost.99 If I am in fundamental despair, any attempt to act constructively seems absurd. The phenomenology of fundamental despair is thus sometimes likened to that of depression. The depressed, Calhoun argues, are ‘not dispirited about this or that bit of the future, but about the future generally. They lose a globally motivating interest in The Future’.100

It strikes me that parts of the climate movement have indeed fallen into this kind of despair. It is no coincidence that the term ‘climate depression’101 circulates among younger activists in particular, describing precisely this feeling of helplessly confronting a mass-extinction event that threatens civilization and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless we are happy to settle for a form of defeatism or nihilism where inaction takes over, this is something we should be concerned about.

Part of the problem, I believe, lies in the way in which public discourse on climate change is conducted, almost exclusively around dystopic or apocalyptic images such as melting polar caps, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and, more generally, an increasing state of chaos; the future is overwhelmingly represented as a threat and disaster. According to Mathias Thaler, this prevalent type of climate catastrophism speaks to the extent to which global warming has, among all its other negative consequence, also brought about a ‘crisis of the imagination’.102 There is no doubt that these dystopic images (some of which are, of course, already a harsh reality) do serve as important reminders of how dire the situation is and how urgently action is required. Yet they must be complemented with more positive and hopeful visions of how we might act together so as to halt, or at least attenuate, the looming climate catastrophe, and of what life in a warmer world might look like. Thaler appeals to the power of utopian thinking in this context—a kind of utopianism that does not serve to escape reality, but that galvanizes a type of hope that gives us the resolve we need to face up to the realities of global warming and act decisively.

We now see that the conflicting features of episodic despair that we have encountered throughout this article have to do with its constitutive instability: it enables us either to regain or redirect our hope (once we see a way forward to some desired version of the future) or it collapses into a more fundamental form of agony and paralysis that corrupts our very sense that the future is open to our intervention. Normatively speaking, this highlights that the value of episodic despair is contingent on our ability to work it through rather than remaining tied to it; unless the sense of urgency it conveys gives rise to new hope as the possibility of our goal comes to be salient, we will eventually give up. Hence any reasons we have to despair are ultimately reasons to adopt more realistic kinds of hope. Despair is only justified to the extent that it makes us better hopers—we should keep this in mind whenever we call for it.

My aim in this article was by no means to unconditionally celebrate despair. Some forms of despair are plainly irrational, others paralyse us, yet others lead us to act in erratic or reckless ways (think of the proverbial act of desperation). Instead, the question I set out to ask was whether there is anything to be said in favour of despair as a practical attitude. Nor was my affirmative answer to this question intended to deny that hope, in allowing us to anticipate a better future and motivating our efforts to bring it about, plays a vital role in political life in particular. Sometimes, however, hope leads us astray. Episodes of despair can then help guard against the dangers of wishful thinking, complacency, or fixation. My suggestion is, furthermore, that we can understand XR activists not as denouncing hope, but as making the case for a different and more realistic kind of hope, one that arises from despair. As activist Dougald Hine puts it, ‘whatever hope is worth having today, it lies on the far side of despair, where the maps run out, at the margins or hidden in plain sight’.103