The Value of Hoping for the Best in a World that Expects the Worst
By Anna Nowland
Hopelessness is more profound than a merely pessimistic attitude toward the future. It is a denial of the possibility of change for the better. While COVID seems easily blamed for exhausting hope, according to the CDC, in the 10 years pre-pandemic, “persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness increased by about 40% among high school students” (CDC). The fact that people of this specific age group are overwhelmed by hopelessness is especially concerning. Present youth are future adults able to enact change, but if they feel this way, what change would they even believe they could bring? Perhaps hope is being replaced by a sense of realism, accepting the horrors of sickness, war, and injustice as a part of being in this world. However, if they’ve negated the possibility of the better, how could they ever achieve anything better than our present situation? Should we cast aside ideals as impractical and unrealistic? This paper will explore the value of hope in a world that seems to warrant hopelessness through a Sartrean lens, and ideals will be shown to have practical value in our pursuit of them, regardless of their actualization.
For Sartre, our existence can be defined by two aspects of ourselves that are inherently in conflict. This distinction is between our facticity, givens of our existence, and our ability to project ourselves into the future in possibilities and the ability to change, transcending our present circumstances (Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology 630, 634). The circumstances in which we are thrown into the world without choice make us what we are in part. Many things happen before we are agents in the world, and these choices made for us set us up in a specific situation we can’t control yet. Despite this, once agents, we can still project ourselves into the future in possibilities. Through this agency, we can change and transcend our present circumstances (634). In taking up a future project for ourselves, we cannot just be what we are in the present. Envisioning ourselves in other circumstances and anticipating the future affects how we go about the here and now (507). We deny our facticity if we overly identify with what we will be but aren’t, ignoring limitations on the actualization of this change. Denying transcendence involves reducing ourselves to only the present circumstances, acting as if nothing can change.
Many of the givens we’ve been born into force us to confront burdensome or unjust aspects of existence before we have much power or the means to fight them. Social inequality, global conflict, institutional wrongdoing, death, and constant other terrible headlines are readily available to anyone with a cellphone. Yet, we also seek to transcend our present circumstances, aiming at future goals. If someone hasn’t even graduated high school yet, their circumstances to choose from are highly limited. Until they move out or support themselves, finances become a considerable limitation on people's choices, especially in a capitalist society. If they overly identify with change-making at that time, that they can have no present part in due to their circumstances, they could easily get burnt out before they can even help. There’s less satisfaction when you can’t perceive any of the effects in a more direct, human-to-human way.
In light of this, the predicament of hopelessness would be the denial of transcendence and reducing yourself to only the present conditions and facts (50). We become hopeless because we deny the possibility of changing our circumstances and our ability to move past the present conditions, resigning ourselves to the way things are. This is what Sartre would call “bad faith” (50). Because of our inability to speak of the future with certainty, our taking up of possibilities and projection of ourselves into the future has to be based on faith in our freedom. For Sartre, bad faith is the reduction of ourselves to only what we presently are (68). When confronted by all of the possibilities in life, our ability to choose for ourselves, and the fact some things are and will remain out of our hands, we may try to flee it by lying to ourselves that we’re confined to our present state (40). By faith, we hold fast to the belief that things are what they are, and that is all. It is a stagnant existence, and the already prevalent stagnancy in overcoming barriers between each other in society only compounds the more hopeless we get.
While Sartre doesn’t use the term faith here in an explicitly religious sense, a religious foundation of this concept is found in his philosophy that applies to the bad faith of today’s youth. He believes that our flight from anguish, or the weight of our freedom in deciding for ourselves, that gives rise to bad faith has an atheistic basis (Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism 7). Because we feel abandoned by a lack of God, the weight of our choices goes back into our own hands (4). While one could argue that the abandonment felt could be in terms of generally believing or not believing in God, even the strongest believer would naturally be tested in the presence of so much evil in the world. So instead, we resign ourselves in bad faith to the idea that wars always need to happen, social unity is unachievable, and attempts at good character will always fall short somehow.
As already noted, when we consume popular media, the terrible things in the world confront us, and a constant mirror is consequently held up to the state of society for our viewing. We read of atrocities committed, witness horrors in videos shared, and watch the morally corrupt gain popularity on social media. We cannot ignore the fact that these things happen due to the interconnectedness of our world through technology. However, despite sometimes being met with stoicism, the hopelessness that arises from our acceptance of how things are still has a sense of suffering that comes with it. We resign ourselves to flee from feeling the suffering of others and the fact that we either feel like our actions to help are futile or that our own suffering has become too great. Just as Sartre discusses bad faith, we know that we are lying to ourselves in some sense if we become hopeless (Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology 40). We may resign ourselves to acting as if we cannot do anything, but we, deep down, know we can. I wouldn’t fear the worst, only ever treating it with a wave of acceptance and nonchalance if I did not believe that something better may also be possible. While the worst might seem the most reasonable to believe in and confine ourselves to, especially given the prevalence of evil we witness, does this mean that ideals have no place in our society? Should we look at the evil in the world with a sense of realism? Given that we cannot entirely dispel our suffering in the face of evil and the moral weight of our decisions, implicating the world beyond ourselves, proper ideals and idealistic attitudes play an essential role in overcoming this hopelessness.
In “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre gives moral weight to the freedom of our choosing. He writes,
When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be (Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism 3).
In choosing something for myself, whether to flee complacency with the state of the world or pursue an idealistic world, I ascribe value to it in choosing it. For example, when I decided that I should go to college, I ascribed value to getting a college education, and therefore, I put forth that others in my circumstances should do the same thing. I endorse and affirm the choice of all others who got a college education through my choosing. Beyond value concerning oneself, each time an individual chooses, it reshapes their new present circumstances and those of others. My new choices are now limited by the previous choice to attend college. Our choices affect others, though, and if more people choose to get a college education than not within a society, this creates an overarching cultural morality that should explicitly value a college education. While my value of a college education may not necessarily directly lead to my judgment of someone in different circumstances, as I could see myself possibly doing something differently if I were them, the reshaping of society would still implicate a possible automatic judgment upon one who did not get a college education. This is part of the importance of choosing to strive for ideals. What we strive for and value in our choosing is beyond merely personal.
An ideal is a type of perfection, and if we are limited to our imperfection, always falling short in some way, to strive for an ideal and fall short would put us in a much better position than falling short of something lesser. There are already plenty of unrealizable things in experience (Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology 634). This occurs concerning ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Our acknowledgment that this very well may be an unrealizable goal, so long it’s not self-destroying, is enough to keep us authentically out of bad faith. We must sometimes reconsider our actions for the sake of knowing if we’re doing things for the right reasons. Reflecting on the project, we must ask ourselves if we still value that unrealizable project over other possibilities. If an ideal is unrealizable, we might get burnt out, frustrated at facticity preventing certain steps forward, and unable to realize our transcendent goal. If we don’t continue taking it up inauthentically, we can always return to it once the burnout passes. Then, we can authentically take up that project again in good faith, refreshed and rejuvenated, ready to continue.
Because we already transcend our circumstances by simply projecting ourselves into the future and recognizing those avenues, there is no reason that positing something seemingly constantly transcending what our present circumstances would be is problematic (634). Positing an ideal actually becomes quite reasonable and practical. The bar becomes set higher for ourselves. Otherwise, especially in times when the absence of God is felt, not at least believing in some ideal to strive toward leads to complacency and a license to act in any way one pleases. By holding fast to an ideal, we prevent ourselves from ever fully succumbing to the present facts of our existence as necessary.
While this striving may seem pointless, there is a similar type of striving in things like pursuing truth in philosophy and science. Absolute truth may never be achieved, but lower truths may still be achieved in the striving toward it. Without believing that a higher truth exists, there would be complacency with lower truths, treating them as if they’re as good as absolute. Why would a philosopher pursue any truths given the shadow cast over our ability to know by Platonic ignorance, antecedent skepticism, mind-body dualism, and the like if there wasn’t value in striving? In the sciences, there’s never any guarantee for the next discovery. For every success, there are countless failures. If they weren’t getting results that they wanted, if they treated science like a pointless pursuit, they would quit right there and move onto something else. Reworking the experiment, reevaluating the circumstances, etc., are all ways to keep driving towards a truth you discover, adding to the overall body of knowledge. While Sartre treats the unrealizable as a limit of our freedom, we have to acknowledge our simultaneous limits in knowledge (530). Absolute knowledge is impossible for us in our distinguishment of parts of the totality, so to claim you know that something is totally impossible turns out to be an expression of bad faith. How can we know something is unrealizable unless we try? We only have our experience to learn from otherwise, so just because something hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it never will. We’re well aware of the uncertainty of the future, and the future affects the present (507). Therefore, in this pursuit, we know that the circumstances could change, pushing things farther along than we otherwise could have foreseen and reinvigorating the idealistic attitude.
If nothing in this world directly references the ideal, positing it theoretically still allows it to come into existence somehow. For example, if someone is a Christian, they may or may not believe in every single story of the Bible, but Christian values, to the fullest extent, are embodied in the ideal person, Jesus. No good Christian could claim they are as good as Jesus. This equates themselves to God in an overzealous way. We are tainted with original sin, doomed to fail at times, but we still strive to be as kind, humble, and so on as Jesus. Despite our inability to be Jesus, we would become significantly better Christians. In our falling short, however, we would also know that we have God’s forgiveness if we did our best and truly believed. Falling short doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
When I acknowledge the ability to transcend present circumstances and pursue an ideal that may never be fully actualized, I bring that into existence through my own. Our future and past constantly inform our present through projection and retention (634). Even without the actualized ideal, this interweaving of past, present, and future allows the cultural sentiment to be initially shaped through this singular choice of positing an ideal goal. In choosing the ideal as a project for myself and ascribing value to it, I believe that others ought to do this and own it by living it (Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism 3). Change is started through each choice, and good progress is made through those choices to pursue something better than what we have now. The bad faith of the youth, exemplified by their hopelessness, does not need to be treated as a rational response, and realism about the state of the world shouldn’t be treated as the new norm. Just as choosing for the better ascribes value to it, choosing complacency with the worse does, too. In accepting the world's evils as a necessary part of life, we treat them with a realistic attitude, and even beyond that, we show that we value complacency and those evils.
At the proposition of hope, the hopeless might ask themselves, “In a world where it seems much more rational to expect the worst, can hoping for the best have an impact?” The answer is decidedly yes. By simply remaining hopeful for the best, we dethrone evil as necessary to existence, and we already bring something better about for ourselves and others. We cannot blame the COVID pandemic or any particular evil of the world for our complacency since the choice is in our own hands to be complacent or not. We very well may never achieve any ideal in the world, always leaving some level of evil, and this may seem like an exhausting undertaking. Is it any more exhausting than holding ourselves back in suffering at the flourishing of evil, though? Camus concludes even Sisyphus should be viewed as happy despite the absurdity of his task each time the rock rolls back down the hill (Camus 24). If we recognize that we have an insurmountable obstacle that we still try to overcome, we are taking up our freedom and choosing in a way that is more authentic to who we are as humans, and we will always enact change in this choosing. We otherwise value complacency in our flight of bad faith from the evil and suffering of the world that counterintuitively affirms it and allows it to flourish, but is this something the hopeless really believe all people should do?
Works Cited
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Éditions Gallimard, 1942. https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf .
CDC. “Protecting the Nation’s Mental Health.” Mental Health, September 23, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/mental-health/about/what-cdc-is-doing.html.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London, England: Methuen & Co LTD, 1957.
———. “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” 1946. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/philosophy/sartre-eih.pdf.