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# What Hope?
- URL: https://www.alicekoubova.cz/jaka-nadeje-en/
- Published: 2025-05-31T21:02:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-07T08:42:59.000Z
- Description: Sluňákov - centrum ekologických aktivit · 31 May 2025
- Author: Alice Koubová
- Tags: Přednáška / vystoupení, Video, Akce, #akce-archiv, #s-ak, #en

At the opening session of the 2025 cycle of Ekologické večery, the philosopher Alice Koubová spoke about hope. She presented a wide range of conceptions of hope within the philosophical tradition. She discussed the relations of hope to power and powerlessness, to wealth, and to those life situations in which power imposes its vision of the world upon us and we stand before it in circumstances that are often personally very difficult, even hopeless. She mentioned the ideas of the climate activist Derrick Jensen, who is convinced that human beings have already crossed the threshold of the planet's destruction and that any hope in this situation strikes him as false. He himself has given up hope — surprisingly, in order to be able to go on doing everything he can to make the world meaningful to him and to continue his efforts to mitigate the damage inflicted on nature, even if only to slow down its devastation.   
Alice Koubová, however, holds that it is not easy to rid oneself entirely of the longing for hope, and that hope has an important role in human life. She located the preservation of hope in the desire for a future state which we cannot in fact influence, yet hope serves us as an opening up of possibilities for action that defy hopelessness. In this way such action actually creates, in the present, the possibility of influencing a future that cannot be influenced directly. Hope understood in this specific way, which is neither naive optimism nor faith in supernatural rescue, can thus be a bridge to the world of a resilient society.