The public discourse on climate change has long centred around hope-based narratives pushed by both the media and mainstream environmentalist agents from Greenpeace and WWF to Bill Gates and Al Gore.11 Most recently, see for instance Gates 2021. The promises of scientific and technological advance in particular, they argue, give us reason to be hopeful that it is in our hands to halt the incipient climate catastrophe. We just need to roll up our sleeves and get on with it. In the face of humanity’s apparent inability—on display most recently at COP26 in Glasgow—to adopt the ‘rapid and far-reaching changes in all aspects of society’ required to at least keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C,22 IPCC 2018. this narrative has come under pressure. More radical climate activists make the case for an affective shift away from hope in the face of global warming towards darker attitudes such as anger, panic, or fear, or, most surprisingly perhaps, despair. The activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has arguably been the most vocal in their call for hope to ‘die’.33 Greta Thunberg (2019) famously encapsulated this sentiment in her Davos speech: ‘I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.’ Hope, they worry, obscures the truth about global warming as the single largest existential threat to the planet and hampers the kind of radical action that would be required at least to rein in its consequences. ‘In facing our climate predicament’, they argue, ‘there is no way to escape despair'.44 Extinction Rebellion 2019, p. 13. The notion of ‘climate despair’ has been used at least as far back as Pooley 2010, but has only recently gained prominence. Reactions have been mixed, both from within and beyond the climate movement. While some fellow activists express enthusiasm about an explicit invocation of despair,55 Hine 2019, p. 11. others worry about its potentially stifling and depoliticizing effects on the public. According to the American scientist Michael Mann, the rhetoric of despair ‘is in many ways as pernicious as outright climate change denial, for it leads us down the same path of inaction’;66 Mann 2017. writer and activist George Monbiot even considers succumbing to despair to be a moral failure.77 Monbiot 2019. In the media, XR are frequently portrayed as the ‘eccentric and dangerous merchants of despair’.88 Harris 2020. This discursive backlash chimes with a philosophical scepticism about despair that is both widespread and long-standing. According to Euripides’ Amphitryon, despair is the ‘mark of a worthless man’;99 Euripides, Heracles, 105–6, cited in Cairns 2020. Aquinas considers it ‘the greatest of sins’;1010 Aquinas 1923, Qu. 20, Art. 3. Kant’s greatest worry is that we might ‘succumb to despair’ in the face of moral obligation;1111 Kant 1996, 8: 309. Charles Peirce equates despair with insanity.1212 Peirce 1992, p. 405. And contemporary philosophers juxtapose celebratory accounts of hope as a motivation and source of grit with a view of despair as unproductive, impotent, or nihilistic. Despairing agents, they argue, should either give up on the relevant end or cultivate an attitude, such as hope, that strengthens their resolve rather than undermining it.1313 E.g., Han-Pile and Stern forthcoming. Unsurprisingly, political philosophers tend to agree that ‘a hopeful politics, one based upon a vision of generalized global prosperity and sustainability, best addresses the problems of climate change’.1414 Moellendorf 2021a, p. xxi. The aim of this article is to withstand this wholehearted rejection of despair in philosophical and public discourse alike. I shall argue that a specific form of despair that I call episodic has an important role to play in our practical and particularly in our political lives.1515 Hope itself has only recently attracted the attention of political philosophers (e.g., Howard 2021; Stockdale 2021). For an overview, see Blöser et al. 2020. In guarding against certain pitfalls of false hope, episodic despair can help us to hope (and ultimately act) well. Against this background, I propose to understand XR activists not as asking us to reject or give up hope, but as aspiring to a more robust and realistic kind of hope, which arises from despair. Before I can make good on this idea, some conceptual ground-clearing is in order. I start by defining episodic despair in contrast, yet closely related, to hope (Section I). An agent who experiences episodic despair is unable to imaginatively close the gap between themselves and a desired future, such that the unlikeliness of the outcome, rather than its possibility, is salient. In Section II, I argue that rational or justified hope requires a complex trade-off between various epistemic and practical considerations that is often difficult to come by precisely from within a hopeful stance. There is thus an inherent risk that hope will degenerate into wishful thinking, complacency, or fixation. In Section III, I draw on claims and statements from XR members (as well as fellow radical climate activists) in order to illustrate how episodic despair can guard against these dangers. As a deliberative corrective, episodic despair can help us to realistically assess the empirical circumstances (III.A), to act in courageous and creative ways (III.B), and to critically reflect on our ends and available alternatives (III.C). However, despair that persists rather than resulting in new and different kinds of hope is fatal, too (Section IV): in destroying our basic underlying sense that the future is open to our intervention (our fundamental hope), it undermines practical agency as such. Hence we should be careful not to play hope and despair off against each other. Despair has not received much attention in Western philosophy, at least within the broadly analytic tradition; its details therefore remain underexplored.1616 Milona 2020, p. 100. Some exceptions are Steinbock 2007; Govier 2011; Ratcliffe 2013; Calhoun 2018. Wherever mentioned, it is scolded and rejected. In the present section, I will take my cue from the recently burgeoning debates about the nature of hope in order to get a grip on that to which it is usually thought to be the antidote: despair. Given the multifaceted role hope plays in our lives, it is hardly surprising that philosophers struggle to provide a unified definition of the phenomenon. According to the so-called ‘orthodox definition’,1717 Martin 2014, p. 211; originally see Downie 1963. hope is a compound state that combines a desire that p with a belief, or at least a presupposition, that p is possible but not certain.1818 On the question of whether hope requires belief in possibility, or rather a lack of belief in impossibility, see Chignell 2022, p. 4. Hope’s cognitive element distinguishes it from modally less constrained wishes on the one hand (I can arguably wish, though not hope, to fly away simply by flapping my arms) and more confident expectations on the other. Its conative element captures the fact that a hoping person takes a pro-attitude towards the hoped-for object. It may well be the case that some of our more superficial and mundane hopes can be defined along these lines: for instance, my hope that there will be apple pie for dessert or that the train will arrive on time. However, the orthodox definition arguably cannot account for hope in its most complete or paradigmatic form, sometimes referred to as ‘substantial hope’,1919 Pettit 2004, pp. 157−9; see also Calhoun 2018, pp. 84−9; and Martin 2014, p. 20, who refers to this as ‘hope against hope’. where the stakes are high, but the probability is low: for instance, my hope for recovery from a serious illness or to have a successful career in academia. These hopes command our attention, thus playing a particularly prominent role in structuring and shaping our thoughts and actions, in ways that go beyond the mere belief-desire combination. This problem comes to the fore most clearly in the orthodox definition’s inability to distinguish between hope and despair. Notice that two people who equally desire an outcome and believe in its possibility may nonetheless differ with regard to their affective outlook. Take Luc Bovens’s by-now iconic example (based on Frank Darabont’s film The Shawshank Redemption) of Andy and Red, two prisoners serving a life sentence for murder.2020 Bovens 1999, pp. 668−9. They both desire to be free and believe that there is a (small) chance they will be able to escape. Yet, while Andy hopes to get out, Red despairs of the low odds. Hence much of the recent debate has focused on identifying a third component (in addition to belief and desire) that would allow us to distinguish hope from despair. Instead of committing to one specific among the countless proposals,2121 Ibid.; Pettit 2004; Meirav 2009; Martin 2014; Kwong 2019, to name a few. I would like to crystallize what I take to be the shared idea underlying most of them: that hopeful and despairing agents differ in the way they relate to, ‘attend to’,2222 Chignell 2022. or ‘perceive’2323 Stockdale 2021, pp. 16−20. the possibility of the desired outcome. The latter looks at the situation and says, ‘I grant you it is possible, but the chance is only one in a thousand!’, while the former says, ‘I grant you the chance is only one in a thousand, but it is possible!’.2424 Meirav 2009, pp. 222−3. It seems that for the hopeful agent the possibility of the desired outcome is salient or in the foreground, rather than its unlikeliness. The imagination appears to play a crucial role in explaining what accounts for this gestalt shift.2525 Martin 2014, p. 44. According to Bovens, for instance, in hoping we ‘mentally image’ what it would be like if the desired state of the world were to materialize.2626 Bovens 1999, p. 674. Cheshire Calhoun takes hope to include a ‘phenomenological idea of the determinate future whose content includes success’, that is, ‘we previsage a particular future in our imagination’.2727 Calhoun 2018, p. 72. Most explicitly, perhaps, Jack Kwong argues that a hopeful person is able, by exercising her creativity and imagination, to see (that is, to visualize in her mind) a way in which the desired outcome can come about, and she sees the way as a genuine possibility.2828 Kwong 2018. Notice that, in contrast to these authors, the involvement of the imagination is not constitutive of hope on my account. Hope requires the possibility of an outcome to be in the foreground; whether this is the case is typically (though not necessarily) a matter of the imagination. This framework allows us to define despair in contrast to this particular kind of (substantial) hope. Like the hopeful agent, the despairing agent experiences a gap between themselves and the desired outcome. In contrast, however, they cannot mentally close this gap by visualizing what it would be like or how we might get there. This also helps us understand why, in cases where the attainment of the hoped-for object depends on our own contribution (which I will primarily be concerned with),2929 Calhoun (2018, p. 6) refers to this as ‘practical hope’. hope helps sustain our resolve or what is now often called ‘grit’,3030 Rioux forthcoming. while despair potentially undermines it. The hopeful agent’s ability to imaginatively inhabit the desired future or project themselves into it stabilizes and structures their connection to that outcome. By contrast, the agent who despairs because they cannot see a way forward is disposed to give up on it. In a specific sense, I conceive of hope and despair not just as mutually exclusive antagonists,3131 While hope rules out despair, it can go along with other emotions such as fear (Stockdale 2019), as well as attitudes such as pessimism. If we are pessimistic about a desired outcome, we expect it not to come about: i.e., we consider its likelihood to be <.5 (e.g. Milona 2019, p. 724). Hence one can be pessimistic yet hold out hope (given that possibility is in the foreground). As a corollary, pessimism cannot tame the dangers of hope that I discuss below. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify. but also as jointly exhaustive. For in the kind of high-stakes scenarios I have in mind, agents necessarily attend to the desire in some way—mental or affective abstention is not an option. In other words, the circumstances are such that we conceive of a desired outcome either from the perspective of its possibility or its unlikeliness. This will be important to keep in mind as I develop the idea that despair is not just a tonic against false hope, but (thereby) helps us to cultivate warranted hope. I should add that I take myself to have defined a particular kind of despair, which I call episodic. I do so primarily to demarcate it from what I refer to (and discuss in more detail in Section IV) as fundamental despair: a general state of hopelessness, where all sense of agency is lost and the future in general is conceived as already determined. Along these lines, Anthony Steinbock describes despair as an ‘utter loss of any ground of hope’, as the ‘experience of abandonment as ultimate and decisive’.3232 Steinbock 2007, pp. 446−7. Episodic despair differs not only in that it is propositional or intentional—we despair over or of something—but it also leaves open the possibility of regaining or redirecting our hope at any point. For, while we cannot experience hope and despair at the same time, the two are closely related, differing only in how the agent relates to a desired yet unlikely outcome. Indeed, agents often find themselves oscillating between the two—depending on whether, at any one moment, the possibility or the unlikeliness is in the foreground. Notice also that episodic despair differs from what I call resignative despair: that is, a desire for a state of affairs combined with the belief that it is impossible. This notion is widespread in discussions of despair. According to Han-Pile and Stern, for instance, ‘the despairing person keeps desiring the good but without being able to act to bring it about because they think it is unobtainable, or that it cannot obtain on its own’.3333 Han-Pile and Stern forthcoming. See also Kretz 2013; Vice 2019. Despair, on this view, is experienced as a kind of painful longing for the impossible that goes along with a sense of frustration and inner conflict. This attitude, they quite plausibly argue, is irrational; if I was hoping to have sea bass at my favourite restaurant, but it turns out there were none at the market today, I should (as a matter of rational consistency) not despair, but simply order something else.3434 Han-Pile and Stern forthcoming. Episodic despair differs from resignative despair in that it retains a belief in possibility, such that it is not necessarily irrational. That, of course, leaves open the question what, if any, value it has for our practical lives. To answer this question, I turn from the nature of hope to its norms. I have provided a definition of episodic despair as the antonym of (substantial) hope. In contrast to the hopeful agent, the despairing agent is presently unable to imaginatively close the gap between themselves and the hoped-for future, such that its unlikeliness is in the foreground rather than its possibility. My claim in the remainder of this article will be that this kind of despair can help us to hope well: that is, to cultivate rational or justified hope by guarding against certain dangers of false hope.3535 Following McCormick (2017, p. 131), I use these terms interchangeably, capturing the difference between hoping well and hoping badly. To prepare the ground for this argument, I first need to explain what it means to hope well. To start with, it is not at all obvious that hope is the kind of mental state that is responsive to reasons and thus open to rational assessment in the first place. In fact, in the history of philosophy, hope has often been conceived as a passion or affect and hence as something fundamentally noncognitive. At this point, suffice it to point out that our communicative practices around hope are highly evaluative: we ask each other to give reasons for our hope, we laud each other for ‘courageous’ or ‘resilient’ hopes, we criticize ‘careless’ or ‘empty’ hopes.3636 Rioux 2021; see also McCormick 2017, p. 131. Notice that to say that we can deliberate about the justification or rationality of hope does not commit us to say that we can will ourselves to have or give up hope in every or even most circumstances.3737 Martin (2014, p. 67) does uphold that in conceptualizing a mental state as responsive to reasons we thereby commit ourselves to the view that ‘it is possible for a person … to adopt, relinquish, revise, or maintain the state … as a direct result of deliberation about the reasons for doing so’. Hope shares this feature with emotions such as anger,3838 See Srinivasan 2018, p. 127 n. 19. which can be more or less fitting or apt independently of whether they are under our direct voluntary control. In investigating the norms of hope, we can take our cue from the observation made in the preceding section that hope, in representing its object as possible and desirable, contains both cognitive and conative elements. From this it follows that hope is subject to both epistemic and practical norms. The former concern the belief component: for hope to be epistemically rational or justified, we must be justified in believing that the desired outcome is neither impossible nor certain. I would like to suggest that beyond that, though, there is no single epistemic threshold for hope. That is to say, it is not per se irrational or misplaced to hope for outcomes that are highly unlikely.3939 McFall 1991; Stockdale 2017, p. 376 n. 2. While evidence indicating that the desired outcome may be out of reach gives us a reason against hope, we may still have warrant to hope for it all things considered—for instance, because we are highly invested in it,4040 Chignell (2018) and McCormick (2017) disagree as to whether the demand for evidential support increases or lessens when it comes to particularly important, life-structuring hopes. muster little mental energy, or if there are simply no available alternatives. These are scenarios where the opportunity costs of hoping tend to be low. Hence, what matters from an epistemic perspective is that a hope is based on a justified probability assessment.4141 Bovens 1999, pp. 678−80; Stockdale 2021, p. 53. For instance, prisoner Andy (see above) is epistemically justified in hoping to escape as long as his belief about the odds of succeeding is justified given the available evidence. Darrel Moellendorf calls this a pragmatic approach to the epistemic standards of hope, according to which ‘different hopes might be warranted under different factual and evidential scenarios depending on the circumstances, and those circumstances might depend on some sort of pragmatic, cost/benefit, calculation regarding hoping’.4242 Moellendorf 2021b, pp. 6−7. In the practical domain, we have to distinguish between moral and strategic norms. On the one hand, given that hope commits us to the goodness of its object, we can ask whether it is rational or justified given the demands of morality (whatever those are taken to be). That is to say, we should not hope for what is bad or immoral. Adapting an example from Luc Bovens, a car-racing enthusiast with a secret desire to witness an accident should not hope for this to happen: that is (on Bovens’s specific account of what it is to hope), ‘devot[e] much mental energy to what it would be like if such and such accident were to occur … the stories I would be able to tell my friends, etc.’.4343 Bovens 1999, p. 679. When it comes to strategic norms, on the other hand, we have to further distinguish two kinds of questions. First, we can ask whether hope makes the attainment of a particular (permissible) desire more likely. Ideally, hope motivates us to sustain our pursuits in difficult circumstances where the prospects of success are dim.4444 E.g., Pettit 2004; Chignell 2018. Yet, this presupposes an accurate understanding of the relation between our own contribution and external circumstances such as luck, environmental conditions, or the agency of other people. Notice that hope (of the practical kind I am interested in) is characterized by a distinct combination of agency and vulnerability. While success depends on my contribution, it is not fully within my hands: if I could simply act so as to bring about the desired outcome, I would not need to hope. In hoping, that is to say, we ‘actively engag[e] with our own current limitations in affecting the future we want to inhabit’.4545 McGeer 2004, p. 104. Justified hope successfully navigates this tension, neither overestimating our own power nor overly relying on factors beyond our control. However, we cannot leave it there. Importantly, a second set of strategic norms concerns the conduciveness of a particular hope to our (permissible) ends more generally; this is a matter not of securing, but rather of selecting our ends. In this context, it is particularly important to keep in mind that hope has opportunity costs. As we invest mental energy in a particular object, we potentially forgo or lose sight of alternative paths. For instance, ‘imagine a political activist who might reject attainable, modest, but real reforms because these would take away from planning and building support for some even better and more thorough-going, but far less likely, change’.4646 Moellendorf 2021b, p. 7. For a hope to be justified in this respect, its benefits must outweigh the opportunity costs.4747 An anonymous referee has suggested to me that there may be further, ‘affective’, opportunity costs, for hope may rule out incompatible attitudes or emotions. Here, I focus on the strategic opportunity costs that concern the likelihood of attaining an end we have set for ourselves. In order to make this assessment and remain aware of ‘what is lost’ when we hope for a given object, we need to constantly monitor the wider practical landscape including any available alternatives. To sum up, a hope is justified if (1) it is based on an accurate probability estimate, (2) helps us realize a (permissible) end, and (3) advances our (permissible) ends more generally. Hoping well, that is to say, requires a constant triangulation between ourselves, our ends, and the wider epistemic and practical circumstances. Now, I want to suggest that, somewhat paradoxically, this trade-off is particularly difficult to come by from within a hopeful stance itself. For hope is essentially a way of focusing on or zooming in on (the possibility of) a particular outcome—of blinding out, by way of the imagination, detrimental evidence and alternative paths. Hoping well, however, requires precisely the ability to zoom out and align our ends with various epistemic and practical considerations. This is why there is an inherent risk for hope to degenerate into false hope: hopeful agents may be disposed to wrongly estimate the likeliness of the outcome, to overly rely on external factors, or to be blind to alternative, more realistic goals. As I hope to show in the next section, episodic despair can thus function as a corrective on hope that guards against these dangers. In conjunction, my claims in Sections I (concerning the nature of hope) and II (concerning the norms of hope) yield a predicament: hope itself may complicate the trade-off between various epistemic and practical considerations that is needed for justified or rational hope. In this section, I propose to read XR’s call for despair as responding to this predicament. Despair can guard against wishful thinking, complacency, and fixation—three forms or expressions of false hope, which they diagnose in our relation to the climate crisis. Ultimately, it can help us to hope well. One of XR’s central claims is that we must finally ‘tell the truth!’4848 See Extinction Rebellion 2021a. about climate change. Activists worry that we underestimate the magnitude of the problem and, as a consequence, overestimate the prospects of solving it. According to XR founder Roger Hallam, one of the main problems we have experienced with climate change and environmental activism is that people rarely seem to talk about empirical reality (i.e. the latest science) and thus aren’t even aware of how desperate the situation actually is.4949 Hallam 2019, p. 13. What he alludes to is a particular form of climate denial; not the form that denies the basic geophysical facts about anthropogenic global warming, but a more widespread yet largely unconscious kind of climate denial that refuses to accept or process just how dire the situation really is. In other words, we must ‘come into knowing’ on a much deeper and more serious level.5050 Extinction Rebellion 2019, p. 61. While the public may be craving reasons to be hopeful or even optimistic about climate change,5151 E.g., Solnit 2021. we must get them to ‘stop pretending’5252 Hine 2019; see also Franzen 2019. and to accept that we are currently headed for mass extinction. Arguably, the obvious way to read these claims would be as saying that despair rather than hope is appropriate given the epistemic circumstances—if we properly attended to the evidence, we would despair over the prospect of averting climate change. In so doing, we simply acknowledge the facts. As activist Derrick Jensen puts it, ‘despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation’.5353 Jensen 2006, p. 5. However, this claim would sit uncomfortably with my remarks above about the epistemic norms of hope. Adverse evidence surely makes it more difficult, as a matter of moral psychology, to sustain our hope, simply because the gap between ourselves and the desired outcome that we have to imaginatively close is bigger. Yet I denied that there is a single determinate epistemic threshold where agents should despair over an outcome rather than hope for it. What matters is that the belief contained in our hope appropriately reflects the relevant facts. Hence I would like to suggest an alternative take on this aspect of XR’s case for despair, namely that hope itself can prevent us from seeing the evidence clearly. A hope-based discourse, according to this argument, obscures the truth about climate change because it shades how dire the situation really is. This claim is at odds with the widespread view, put forward for instance by Nancy Snow,5454 Snow 2013. that hope is an epistemic virtue that facilitates intellectual flourishing in a variety of ways. According to Snow, hope can be a source of motivation to pursue an intellectual goal in the first place (for example, acquiring new knowledge about the world), and it can equip us with the kinds of resilience, perseverance, flexibility, and openness that are essential to the achievement of our intellectual goals. By contrast, the agent who lacks a hopeful disposition may resign her enquiry too quickly and despair of the possibility of understanding. XR, I take it, highlight that there is also a darker side to the epistemic effects of hope. While Snow may be right that, in some instances, hope helps us to recognize or represent the world as it is, in other cases it can be an epistemic vice that hinders us in doing so. As Aaron Cobb argues, ‘hope can also create dispositions that threaten the agent’s capacity to engage in responsible inquiry’, for instance because ‘the hopeful agent … may ignore or fail to attend to evidence indicating that the desired outcome is impossible’.5555 Cobb 2015, p. 270. Why is this so? According to Luc Bovens, the imaginative activity involved in hoping is the primary culprit.5656 Bovens 1999, p. 678. Specifically, our visualization of a successful future may, as it were, ‘bleed into’ our perception of reality, thus obfuscating a distinction that is in turn critical for our ability to form beliefs on the basis of the evidence. This explains why hopeful agents may display an epistemic bias, in the sense that they end up being more confident about the desired outcome than they have epistemic reason to be. Their hope then turns into wishful thinking (if they simply raise the probability assessment beyond what is warranted) or even ungrounded optimism (if they mistakenly conclude that the outcome is probable rather than just possible).5757 On the difference between hope and optimism in particular, see Eagleton 2015. By contrast, the despairing agent does not close the gap between themselves and the desired outcome in this way. In despairing, recall, we see a desired future from a different perspective: the perspective of unlikeliness rather than possibility. Given that the despairing agent does not face the predicament of blurred lines between reality and imagination, they are able to look at the evidence in a more sober and less rose-tinted way—their despair makes them more attuned to the actual circumstances. A hope formed on the basis of such an epistemic assessment would consequently be more robust and realistic. In the prisoners’ example above, Red’s despair may actually make him more attuned to the risks of a possible escape (such as the challenge of surmounting the prison’s security regime). He may thus end up with a more realistic assessment of the prospects than his hopeful friend, an assessment on the basis of which he would be able to form a hope that is epistemically justified. Theodor W. Adorno instructively worries about precisely these epistemic pitfalls of hope, in a very different context. Writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Adorno is concerned that hope is essentially a psychological coping mechanism for people to come to terms with