Hope in a Time of Fear

This month, I made a bit of time to read two books that have come to shape my thinking over the past few weeks. The first, Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation,¹ returned me to the rhizome as a metaphor through which to reimagine the future of higher education. The second, Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope,² gave voice to the mood—hope—through which that future might be imagined and enacted.

Let’s begin by considering the question of mood … 

We often think about a mood as something that befalls us. And it’s true, moods are reminders that, despite all our efforts to be mindful and intentional, sometimes you just feel a certain kind of way. 

Han recognizes that mood is not incidental to how we work and live together — it is fundamental. Here, Han borrows directly from Heidegger, whose existential analytic of human-being (Dasein) in Being and Time identifies anxiety (Angst) as a fundamental mood that uncovers the being of human-being to us.³ Han has an extended critique of Heidegger’s appeal to Angst as a primary, heuristic mood because it “turns individuation, separateness, into an essential trait of human existence.”⁴ The critique resonated with me, and called my attention back to the relational ontology articulated in Glissant’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of the rhizome.

But let’s return to the question of mood.

Hope: the Counter-Mood to Fear

Our moods shape what we notice, what we reach toward, and what we believe is possible before we even begin to reason about it. 

And right now, across higher education — and across these United States — the prevailing mood is fear. 

We feel it in our fracturing politics and in the war that rages in the Middle East. We feel it in the threats to higher education and to free inquiry, in the attacks on our international and immigrant communities, and in the pressures on university budgets. We feel it in the disorientation of new technologies whose vast power and evolving influence stretch beyond the reach of human wisdom. 

But Han rightly diagnoses what fear does to us: it closes us off to one another. It narrows our attention to self-protection and survival. And it turns the future into a threat to be managed, closing it off from the possible and the new. 

As a mood that shapes experience, fear isolates and alienates us.  

Hope, Han insists, is the counter-mood of fear.  

Hope “provides meaning and orientation.” It opens us outward, toward one another, toward futures we cannot yet see clearly. “Hope,” he says, “is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast is incapable of speech;”⁵ it lacks all eloquence.  

Hope empowers us to imagine, to tell compelling stories; it “unites and forms communities”⁶. Han says hope “leans forward in order to listen …Hope is the beat of the wing that carries us,”⁷ he writes.  

I would say, as a mood, hope has to be discovered in everyday life. It attunes us to the world and to one another. Its posture is to lean forward and to listen…  

Openness is the Common Root of Hope and Trust 

Strangely enough, this kind of openness is precisely what links hope to trust. Han writes: “Like hope, trust presupposes an open horizon. To trust someone means to build a positive relationship with that person despite a lack of knowledge of the future.”⁸  

Over the course of my career, I have observed campuses as they rise to challenges and falter under them. In every case, this is what I’ve noticed: meaningful progress depends on trust. 

Nothing moves the university with any enduring power more than trust. As Han puts it: “Trust enables action in the absence of knowledge.”⁹ Human action, being finite, requires always a dimension of trust. So finding ways to remain open—vulnerable even—during periods of great uncertainty, will enable us to imagine and chart a future course together.

The Fluctuating Complexity of the World

This returns me to Glissant and his Poetics of Relation. It returns me, in fact, to a beautiful sentence he wrote about the humanities:

Every expression of the humanities opens onto the fluctuating complexity of the world.¹⁰

The humanities teach us to be open to the fluctuating complexity of the world, however daunting, however wondrous. There is, in this openness, a certain solidarity; not simply with other human-beings, but with the rich network of connectedness that gives voice to what Glissant calls “Relation.” When he uses the term, “Relation,” and particularly when he capitalizes it, there is a danger that the effort to give voice to the rich texture of interconnection—indeed, to the “fluctuating complexity” of relating—will calcify into an abstraction. As a concept, “Relation,” risks becoming one more generalizable absolute designed to capture cleanly the complex phenomenon it seeks to express.

To resist this totalizing tendency of the concept, Glissant writes that what it expresses is: “the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solidary and solitary there.”¹¹

Solidarity and Solitude

If Heidegger’s emphasis on Angst is the mood that reveals human-being as irreducibly individual, separate, and unique, Han’s emphasis on hope is the mood that uncovers human-being as ineluctably interconnected, interdependent, and integral to the life of the whole.

And this returns me, finally, to our conversation in January about Love, Complexity, and Interconnection and specifically to Josiah Royce’s recognition that love aligns the “callings of individuals” into the cooperative life of the beloved community.

Solitude and solidarity are not opposed to each other, they belong to one another. The irreducible uniqueness of the individual, which I’ve called “unicity,”¹², finds expression only in and through meaningful connection, that is, in and through community with others.

Perhaps Han and Heidegger are not so apart here, for Angst is the mood that opens us to our ownmost being-toward-death, that is, to the abyss of finite life. And, as Han reminds us, hope “germinates close to the abyss.”¹³ Here on the precipice we find ourselves…and one another.

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