Philosophy for Us
Part Two · Across Time, Death & Meaning · Series 25

Hope, Despair & the Future

My kid asked if it'll be okay, and I couldn't answer.

9 episodes ↓ 25 sources ↓ EthicsReligion

The question

I have a number I check. You probably have one too — a chart, a tracker, a feed of the bad news you've decided is the real news. Mine's the one with the line going up. And every morning I check it the way you'd press on a bruise, and the line is a little higher, and I tell myself I'm just staying informed. Facing reality. Not one of the people with their heads in the sand. Then someone at work says something hopeful — the technology's coming, people are mobilising, it's not too late — and I feel a flare of contempt I'm not proud of, because it sounds like a child who hasn't looked at the line.

But here's what I caught myself doing last week. My kid asked me — just asked — is it going to be okay? And I opened my mouth to give the honest answer, the clear-eyed one, the one that proves I've looked at the line. And I couldn't. Not because I'm soft. Because I suddenly wasn't sure the despair was the honest answer. I'd been treating "it's basically over" like a fact I'd bravely accepted — but standing there, I couldn't tell if I'd accepted it because the evidence forced me to, or because it let me off the hook. Because if it's over, I don't have to do anything. If it's over, my contempt for the hopeful is justified instead of cheap. And I realised I didn't actually know whether my despair was the truth or the place I go to hide.

What you practise

"I'm just being realistic." You say it about the future, as if you were reading the facts. Here you find out what it is covering for. Two people can agree on every number and one hopes while the other gives up, so the numbers did not hand them their mood. You took a stance, and a stance can be asked about. You learn to ask what yours is doing for you: despair can excuse you from the work, hope can spare you from looking. Nobody here tells you to hope or give up. By the end you can say where you stand, and why, to someone who stands somewhere else.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

  1. 01

    The Number I Check

    A number checked every morning, and a child's question — is it going to be okay — for which the honest answer refuses to come. The first episode sets out the question underneath the forecasts. What kind of thing is a hope, or a despair — a reading of the facts, or a stance you take and answer for?

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  2. 02

    Cope, or Courage?

    The case for despair and the case for hope, each stated at its real height — the despairing case made tougher than the feeds make it, the hopeful case made tougher than the candle-and-quotation version. No winner is picked; when both cases stand at full strength they come out level, and the levelness itself is the finding.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  3. 03

    Same Numbers, Different Hearts

    Adrienne Martin's How We Hope (2013) is set against the cognitivist account on the question of what a hope actually is — a belief about what is possible, or a way of treating a possibility as a reason to act. The dispute is left unsettled, and what the two sides agree on turns out to be enough — two people can share every number on the chart and still end up in different places.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  4. 04

    There's No 'More Accurate' Stance

    The reasonable fallback — feel exactly what the evidence warrants, no more and no less — is examined and found empty. If two honest people read the same figures and land in opposite moods, there is no more accurate feeling to retreat to, and waiting for the picture to become clear enough to tell you how to feel is waiting for something the figures cannot contain.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  5. 05

    Or You Could Give Up Hope Entirely

    A position missing from the hope-or-doom argument. Seneca and Spinoza hold that hope and fear are one condition — a mind in suspense, hanging on a future it does not control — and that both can be deliberately set down; Ernst Bloch's educated hope treats hope as a collective practice rather than a private mood. Both are built seriously and left standing.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  6. 06

    Despair Has an Old Name

    Settled despair has an old name. Aquinas called it desperatio and traced it to acedia — the sorrow that flees the good and then calls the fleeing honesty — a vice, not an achievement of clear sight. The episode presses the accusation, hears the doomer's reply that a stance can have a disreputable history and still track the truth, and withdraws only despair's exemption from questioning.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  7. 07

    And Hope Can Be the Lie

    The same examination turned the other way — hope can be the comfortable option too, a reassurance that arrives before any looking has been done and whose function is to make sure the looking never happens. By the end neither the clear-eyed no nor the warm yes can claim to be simply seeing clearly.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  8. 08

    Striving Without Certainties

    Mara van der Lugt's hopeful pessimism — concede every grim figure, expect nothing from what you do, and act anyway. The position is built at full strength, tested on the most pointless thing the host does — visiting a relative who no longer knows him — and one doubt is left unresolved, whether the knowledge of having done right is itself a reward kept back.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →
  9. 09

    Neither Hope Nor Resignation

    Albert Camus, deliberately kept out until the last episode, argues that hope and despair are both appeals against the absurd — the collision between a mind that demands meaning and a world that does not answer. His test is put to every position in the series, including his own, and no verdict is offered.

    ▶ Listen Read transcript →

Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

Adrienne MartinSenecaKatie StockdaleThomas AquinasAlbert CamusTerry EagletonMara van der LugtJonathan Lear

Related series

Your turn

Your brother has been in prison for eleven years for a killing he says he didn't do. You believe him. He has one last appeal. His lawyer is honest with you both and puts the chance at about one in twenty. Your mother has spent her savings on it and visits every week. You stopped going two years ago. You told her you were just being realistic, and that the hope was hurting her more than the sentence. She says you gave up on him. You have both read the same letters from the same lawyer.

  1. You and your mother agree on the odds. So what divides you? If it isn't the numbers, what is it?
  2. What does "it's hopeless" let you stop doing? Now ask the same of her hope. What does it spare her from facing?
  3. Your brother has asked you to keep believing. Do you owe him hope, or only the truth? If you owe him hope, can you give it because he asked?

A good answer has to explain how the two of you read the same letters and ended up in different places, say what your position spares you and what hers spares her, and do all that before it decides which of you gave up on him.

Sources

Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.

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