“It is the drive of energy that embeds us in the world - in the ecology of life, ethics and politics.”
(Zournazi 2002, pp. 14-15)
Imagine a seed planted, uncertain of its survival and with insurmountable courage it uses the resources directly around it to form itself through germination, emerging into daylight where it begins to grow in a new phase of development. It has no idea what it will meet when it emerges from the soil, nor any prediction of what prey or pest may take it’s new fresh leaves. It does not know if rain will fall regularly or that the sun will warm the earth and support it’s growth. The seed has hope, as a living ‘body’ with ‘conatus’ (Bennett, 2010) it trusts there is life beyond this temporal moment and has the courage to continue becoming itself in spite of the struggles and uncertainties it will face. Humankind, different to the seeds, are capable of conceptualising this experience as hope; a multifaceted, incorporeal, spiritual and embodied essence of human experience (Schumacher, 2003; Waterworth, 2004; Zournazi, 2002).
Through literature, religion, passing conversation, philosophical considerations - between soil and seed - there are stories of hope invisibly written that encourage us to strive for something different, something imaginable and unimaginable (Levitas, 2017) that enables us to resist suffering; even ensuring our survival against the greatest of odds (Solnit, 2016) . Yet hope is immeasurable, defying categorisation (Webb, 2013) and hope’s characteristics exist across and through ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, 2007) and neighbourhoods of other phenomenon (Waterworth, 2004). Through hoping humankind encounters immanence; ourstories entangled across and through mutual and reciprocal becomings. Our ethical responsibility to justly co-create is part of the mosaic of where and how we dwell as communities of ‘bodies’ and place, with ourstories spatially and temporally responding to relational webs being woven through shared aspirations for unknown future potentials.
References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter
Levitas, R. (2017) Where there is no vision.the people perish: a utopian ethic for a transformed future, in Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity essay series on Ethics in Sustainable Prosperity.
Schumacher, B. N. (2003) A Philosophy of Hope: Joseph Pieper and the contemporary debate on hope.
Solnit, R. (2016) Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Waterworth, J. M. (2004) A Philosophical Analysis of Hope.
Webb, D. (2013) Pedagogies of Hope, in Studies in Philosophy and Education
Zournazi, M. (2002) Hope: New Philosophies for Change (Introduction)