Hope as Our Deepest Orientation

We talk about hope as if it were fuel. People “run out” of it. Hopes get “dashed.” Someone in a hard season is said to have “lost hope,” as though it slipped out of a pocket. I want to suggest something different: that hope was never a supply at all, but the most basic direction we face.

What Is Hope?

What is hope, and what is it to us? Some would call it an emotion that comes and goes. Others would describe a vague sense that someday things will be “right.” Most of the time we treat it as anticipation—maybe a fleeting, passive idea, close to wishful thinking.

But what if hope were always with us? What if it were our most fundamental state—not something riding on the surface, not a quantity we can exhaust, but our deepest orientation, expressed through action?

We Live Toward the Future

We usually divide time into past, present, and future. The popular message of our day is that the present is all we have. The past, we’re told, is off limits; it only depresses us with mistakes we can’t fix. Enter with caution—the past doesn’t exist! The future doesn’t exist yet either, so we can’t “have” it. That leaves the present, because it’s the only thing we directly experience.

Notice the trick being played here. We can experience and relive the past, sometimes so vividly that it becomes our present. It is real enough that our brains bother to hold on to it. The future, too, will be experienced; how “soon” depends on many factors, including how we choose to define the future. The present is simply what sits between what was and what could be or will be. It may be all that exists in a given moment, but how strange to conclude that this moment is all we have, as if we were static. We learn and we plan. Isn’t that grasping the past and the future?

So what is the present, other than an undefined point between a start and an end? I’d turn the usual picture around. The past is what’s real—as far as we know, it’s settled and permanent. The present is pure becoming: unformed, pregnant with the future about to arrive. We live from a very real past toward an unsettled future.

That is where we experience our core. We are not oriented from present to past, but from past to present to future. As creatures, we are built to anticipate the next moment, however near it is. We live, as it’s been described, forwards in time.

And what is the future but possibility—potential we can act on, work toward, achieve, or discover? That is hope, and hope through action. If the present is all we can claim, then we are trapped between two nonexistent realities, unable to learn or plan.

Hope as an Ontological Force

Ernst Bloch made hope the center of his philosophy in The Principle of Hope (1954–1959), describing it as the “principle” that propels human life forward. For Bloch, hope is an ontological force—a basic drive toward utopia, toward a better world—that shows up in everyday dreams, art, myths, and even revolutionary action. He writes that “hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them” (Bloch, 1986).

Hope, on this view, is not passive waiting. It is an expansive, creative energy that turns us toward unrealized potential—hope opening into more hope. Bloch surveys utopias in many forms, from medical advances to social ideals to fairy tales, and argues that hope is “anticipatory consciousness”: our innate tendency to imagine and strive for what is “not-yet” but could be. In that sense, hope is with us even in despair, because it’s the light that guides us through the present into a future. Hope is what critiques the present and imagines alternatives. Without it, we’d be stuck in the stasis of the present alone, unable to bridge the gap between what is and what could be.

This is a richer picture than the reductive view of hope as passive or vague anticipation. Philosophers usually identify two elements in hope: (1) a desire for an outcome, and (2) a belief that it’s possible, though uncertain. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, hope is “an attitude towards the possible,” distinct from expectation, which assumes a higher probability, and from fear, which anticipates harm (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020). Hope can be directed at a specific goal, like recovering from an illness, or it can be a general disposition, like being a hopeful person.

Hopes Fail; Hope Doesn’t

Hopes can certainly be dashed when reality intervenes. But that doesn’t diminish hope itself—it redirects it. Hope isn’t a commodity that runs out when we can’t make it up some metaphorical hill. A hope that goes unrealized in one future can be redirected toward another.

Søren Kierkegaard captures this: “To hope is to act as if you await the possibility of good” (Kierkegaard, 1995). Hope is active and lived. When we hope in the present moment, we link ourselves to the future, and it becomes real to us—perhaps not with the concreteness of direct, everyday experience, but real enough to feel the edges of its frame.

We relate to hope not as owners of a finite resource, but as beings defined by it.

Hope is what makes us goal-oriented, imaginative, and resilient.

Hope in Dark Places

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and the founder of logotherapy, argued in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) that even in the depths of suffering, hope of the kind I’ve been describing drives us toward personal meaning. Echoing Nietzsche, he wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’” (Frankl, 2006).

Frankl observed that the prisoners who held on weren’t necessarily those with the strongest bodies, but those who acted out of hope—through love, through work, or through their attitude toward suffering they could not avoid. “We may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed,” he wrote. “For what matters then is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement” (Frankl, 2006).

For Frankl, hope is resilient because it doesn’t depend on external circumstances alone. It is also an inner stance, tied to our freedom to choose our attitude toward the future—even a future we cannot escape. In his most famous line: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (Frankl, 2006). He is speaking here about choice, will, and purpose. But without hope’s link to the future, one’s way would not be clear. Without hope, present suffering would be all there was.

Knowing Yourself

That kind of meaning requires deep self-knowledge. To choose how to respond to a dire situation, you have to know your own character—your values, desires, and inner strengths. In the camps, Frankl reflected on his love for his wife, his unfinished manuscripts, and his spiritual convictions. These anchored him and pointed him toward a future, even one he couldn’t see.

Knowing what matters to you makes you resilient because hope then becomes immanent—tied not to passing circumstances but to an enduring capacity to bring many possible futures into being. Frankl’s hope was not blind optimism. It fueled a defiant act of will: a refusal to let suffering define his existence, and a refusal to treat the present as the only thing that counts.

David Goggins offers a modern, visceral version of the same idea in Can’t Hurt Me (2018). Goggins went through an extreme personal transformation, and hope of this kind sits at the center of his story. Realizing his hopes—of greatness, or simply of getting better each day—became his entire aim. Like Frankl, he saw that hope had been there all along: “From the time you take your first breath, you become eligible to die. You also become eligible to find your greatness” (Goggins, 2018). For Goggins, greatness is hope in action: seeing what’s possible and moving toward it with everything you have.

He also came to believe that purpose starts within—that you have to know yourself well enough to see where hope comes through in you. “The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself,” he writes (Goggins, 2018). Self-understanding lets hope flow from within into action, even when that action demands resilience.

And resilience, in this light, isn’t stoic endurance. It’s hopeful adaptation. Knowing your limits, desires, and sources of meaning strengthens your hold on hope against despair. When we act on a hope, it’s because that hope has passed through the channels of our self-awareness—and that is how dark places become sites of transformation. Frankl shows that hope isn’t always naive; it can be defiant. Goggins shows how hope through action can remake a person. Our hope in one particular future may die, but we can always find hope to place in another.

Hope as Fundamental

To relate to hope this way is to embrace humanity’s forward thrust. Hope is not just anticipation or expectation; it’s the engine of possibility, turning potential into reality amid uncertainty. If hope were only surface-level, we really would “run out” in hard times. But it runs deeper than that. It’s always available, as long as we face the future with purpose and self-knowledge.

We are not just dwellers in the present. We are makers of the future, and hope is the thread that connects what has been to what has yet to be born.

References

Bloch, E. (1986). The principle of hope (Original work published 1954–1959). MIT Press.

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning (Original work published 1946). Beacon Press.

Goggins, D. (2018). Can’t hurt me: Master your mind and defy the odds. Lioncrest Publishing.

Kierkegaard, S. (1995). Works of love. Princeton University Press.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2020). Hope. Retrieved August 20, 2025, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hope/