Life without hope is nothing: everyone knows that. What people forget is that a life filled with hope is everything. Hope is rightly described as one of the great virtues, because it adds light and sweetness to everything it accompanies.

Hope really makes a difference: hardships and sufferings can be endured, great efforts made, patience found. Things are possible even if hope is slim, so long as it is real — which means reasonable. The reasonableness point matters, because Nietzsche’s acid remark that “hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs torment” is true when hope is really no more than futile wishful thinking. This is not hope but the shadow of despair.

But real hope is the sustainer of all that is possible and good, and it is creative. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry demonstrates this in his advice about getting people to build a ship: “Do not cajole them to cut down trees, saw them into planks and nail them together,” he said, but rather “teach them to long for the immensity of the sea.” Every teacher should have this remark pinned up somewhere.

If people have hopes, they leap for them; and the higher the hopes, the higher the leaps. Of course, high leaps can lead to hard falls. To the free spirit that risk is always worth taking: better to have leapt and fallen than never to have leapt at all. But there is a sober thought in the offing: that it is just a fact of life, and a very familiar one, that not all or even, perhaps, most hopes are realised. When much is made to hang on a given hope the resulting disappointment can seem bitter. And that is not a good thing.

A classic case of high hopes and great expectations is the arrival on the scene of a charismatic new personality after a time of failure and depression. One way to ensure that a bearer of promise fails is to make the weight of expectation upon him too great. But the hope placed upon him may buoy him onwards: hope has power, hopelessness has none.

A.C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London

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