The cross : Is hope a virtue to work on or above all, as you write, an abandonment?
Corine Pelluchon : It is a theological virtue, as Péguy reminds us in a very beautiful text, comparing it to a little girl to whom no one pays attention but who drags along her two big sisters, charity and faith, respectively compared to a mother and to a wife. Like this little girl, hope is not heroic or spectacular; it is not born of the will, but of abandonment.
From this point of view, it is not like the other virtues, such as prudence or courage, which are dispositions that one acquires by making efforts. Hope presupposes the experience of loss, and the dissolution of one’s illusions, in particular of omnipotence. It needs humility to emerge. It is born from the crossing of the negative, from the test of evil and even from suffering, which dissipates dreams of grandeur.
You quote Bernanos and Péguy at the beginning of your work. How do you define hope from the Christian heritage?
C. P. : “Hope sees and loves what is not yet and what will be”, writes Peguy. It is the capacity to see in the chaotic present the harbingers of what is not yet totally there, but can be announced, and opens the horizon which, until then, was blocked. The biblical image found in Ezekiel, which speaks of a valley full of dry bones covering themselves with flesh, testifies to this passage from death to life, from depression to vitality, which is hope. .
Hope is the feeling that progress is possible, despite all the difficulties and all the forces opposed to its advent. It stands at the crossroads of horizontality and verticality because it articulates our daily lives with what works in depth in a society. But if I feed on theological sources, which are irreplaceable if one wants to grasp what hope is instead of reducing it to a psychological trait, I give it a secular content. Showing the harbingers of a new age without denying the seriousness of the situation is also the role of artists, writers or philosophers.
How is it different from hope?
C. P. : Hope is always particular – one hopes for such and such a thing – and it is always linked to oneself. It originates from a desire, sometimes illusory, a projection. Hope is not about something determined, and it is not the fruit of our personal desires. It is the expectation of something which is in germ and relates to history. An age to come that is still barely visible, like the age of the living, to which the concern for ecology and the animal cause bear witness. It is an expectation that presupposes availability, openness and commitment.
Isn’t it then a form of optimism?
C. P. : No, because optimism is a posture: we say ” I want to believe it “, to make believe that we have the solution to all the problems. For example, promoting geothermal or nuclear energy. Optimism is a consolation or the mask of denial. Hope has its eyes open; it is aware of the current dangers and even of the looming catastrophe, of the possibility of collapse.
You also address the collective dimension of hope. Is rediscovering hope also healing our democracy?
C. P. : Hope at the collective level is the fact of feeling that we have a common future. It is an energy. We don’t know when and how. What we feel today is a weariness, which manifests itself at the ballot box as in daily life. It is difficult to live without a perspective for the future. But many people, especially young people, are in this situation.
In this context, nationalist movements which divide society between friend and foe or far left parties which make themselves the exclusive representatives of the general will are more successful than other parties. Because the latter only propose to attenuate the negative effects of neoliberalism. Even if they succeed, they lack vision.
We must be aware of the dangers inherent in this period. You have to agree to go through this night, until you are done with your dreams of conquest and the desire to fight it out. Without that, we remain in the ideology which is the caricature of hope and which encloses. Hope frees the horizon.
In the foreword to your book, you return to the reasons, personal and political, which led you to write this book. What are they ?
C. P. : This is not a work in which I indulge myself as in an autofiction. However, in the foreword, I say where I am talking about. In order to avoid words when dealing with hope, one must have experienced this crossing of the negative that is despair, which takes many forms and always involves risks. Philosophy is not an abstract or overarching discourse. I suffered from depression when I was young, and because of my environmental and animal rights work, I later experienced the depression, anger, indignation and helplessness characteristic of eco-anxiety.
The main reason for this book is my desire to be useful to young people who think they have no future. Faced with the possibility of collapse linked to global warming, they take stock of the vulnerability of our civilization and the questionable nature of the equation progress-unlimited growth. Eco-anxiety is the response to this moral and psychic reworking. It also comes from the love of the world, from the wish that humanity is up to it, because many suffer above all from the absence of adequate responses to animal suffering and global warming.
I don’t have the keys to get out of this night. But I can testify, today, at 55, to what it is possible to do to get through it. It was a duty for me to do so.