Hope

In view of the climate crisis and the corroding of liberal democracy many people are wondering whether there is still hope. Instead of trying to give a comforting answer to this hopeless question, this booklet examines the phenomenon of hope, hope in ordinary life, hope in Pandora's box, utopian hope as in Marxism. Since utopian hope is a secularization of Christian hope, a study of this highest form of hope in the Western tradition is a logical follow-up. Rather than a mere repetition of how Christian theology understands the "heavenly virtue" of hope, what is presented is a novel interpretation of this religious notion of hope from the standpoint of psychology as the discipline of interiority, that is, an exploration of the meaning and function of (Christian) hope for the soul and in light of the question of the humanness of the human animal. The loss of religion and metaphysics in modernity is not the psychological disaster that it seems to be. It is also a gift of history, being the condition of the possibility of psychology, as Jung pointed out, and therefore also, as shown here, the condition of the possibility of a new, higher-level hope, psychological hope.