Towards a Less-Anxious Age

“When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery,” wrote Dostoyevsky in The House of the Dead (1862). Hope is often seen as a form of inaction, a passivity on the part of a person. It may even imply an avoidance of personal or collective responsibility. Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han is known for going against the grain, and he does that by elevating hope to its rightful place in his book, The Spirit of Hope.