Stanford Humanities Center
During a trip to England in the 1860s, Russian writer Fedor Dostoevskii was deeply impressed by the Crystal Palace, a Victorian building erected for the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Architects and thinkers of the time—including Charles Barry, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, William Cubitt, Thomas Leverton Donaldson, Joseph Paxton, and Robert Stephenson—saw the palace as the celebration of nineteenth-century faith in scientific and technological progress, which would lead to human happiness and wellbeing.
Dostoevskii instead saw the Crystal Palace as the symbol of human decadence and the negation of individual freedoms. Humankind’s questions and problems, he thought, could not be answered or solved through the mathematical precision and economic relations that the palace exemplified by leaving its bare structure visible to the naked eye and by using industrial materials such as iron and glass. This type of hope in humankind’s progress represented, in Dostoevskii’s eyes, the end of hope and of what makes us humane and the beginning of mass society and of herd mentality.
To the rationality exemplified by the Crystal Palace, Dostoevskii opposed qualities such as will, imagination, and whim—specifically humane qualities that cannot be quantified or controlled by exact sciences. Among these qualities, beauty plays a particular role, as Dostoevskii states in The Idiot: “Beauty will save the world.” Here, beauty is not an aesthetic principle but, rather, hope and faith in the human spirit’s abilities and creations. When revealing the splendid beauty of being, human creations enable us to overcome historic contingency and to open up to the future. In this way, beauty becomes one with hope, its face among humans.
Almost a century later, in 1966, Russian film director Andrei Tarkovskii defines hope in similar terms in Andrei Rublev. Here, beauty-hope is exemplified through Andrei Rublev’s icons, like Trinity and Annunciation. Throughout the film, Tarkovskii shows us how Rublev reacts to human violence and cruelty—represented by the Mongol invasion and persecutions against Pagan believers—through artistic beauty. Icons, with their harmony, structure, and tranquility, not only are far away from suffering and torture, but make hope visible to the human eye. In fact, Tarkovskii is telling us that we cannot experience and understand beauty and hope without knowledge of evil. After all, this is the meaning of icons for Orthodox spirituality: hope in the divine spark that resides in each human being and, hence, faith in human perfectibility, by virtue of which “we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home” (2 Peter 3: 13). From hope construed this way stems Boriska’s exclamation upon completing the construction of the bell in Andrei Rublev: “What a feast for humanity!”
This conception of hope is deeply rooted in East Slavic culture, so much so that we find it in one of the most ancient texts of Old Rus’—the Chronicle of Bygone Years (ca. 12th century). Amidst wars and conflicts, Prince Volodymyr (r. 10th cent.) sends messengers and diplomats to explore other religious faiths and determine which one better suits the people of Rus’. While other faiths inspire sadness or sound unfit to the lifestyle of the Rus’ian people, Greek Orthodoxy elicits a completely different reaction from the messengers: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men” (Chronicle of Bygone Years, year 987). From this excerpt, we can see how early East Slavic civilization already sees beauty as the revelation of truth and the face of hope for humanity.
These three distinct episodes show us how beauty, when understood not as aestheticism but as the revelation of ontological and ethical principles, gives us hope in the moment and is a trace of what will outlive us and a token of overcoming present evils. My area of research—pre- and early modern East Slavic literature—helps me foster hope because in it I can find beauty, that is, poetry and creations that allow us to sensorially experience truth. This is the function of art, and especially of literature, which deals with the uniquely human faculty of language—a fundamental aspect of our lives and of our way of experiencing the world that can make sense even of evil and of death.
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Hope: The Future of an Idea
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This year at the Stanford Humanities Center, we asked our fellows to reflect on questions of this kind. Their work ranges from the esoteric to the immediate, from the deep past to the present moment, and across the disciplines from music and art history to philosophy and education. Our aim here is to create a repository of informal thinking about the presence of hope in what we do, not only as scholars, artists, and practitioners but as people living in the twenty-first century.
It is natural to say we live in a hopeless time, as climate change, war, authoritarianism, and other dangers loom over us. Without dismissing the force of despair, this Colloquy proposes to recover the grain of hope, not as a two-dimensional response to three-dimensional problems but as a complex problem on its own. The title of the Colloquy, in which we call hope an idea, is meant to signal this approach.
The contributions collected here, while conceived from many distinctive intellectual and personal positions, are best discovered in twos and threes. Read or watch one, then another and another, at random. Imagine these items as belonging to a virtual conversation, which stands in for the exchange of ideas that takes place every day at the Center. Some of the contributors are professionally connected to the problem of hope—for instance, the historian of philosophy Pavlos Kontos is now writing authoritatively about hope in Aristotle’s thought—while others accept our invitation to fold the topic into their projects or their lives as scholars. Some simply register the place of hope in their lives.
Finally, we bear in mind that, even when it is concerned with historically remote cultures or recondite questions, research in the humanities is always about the present and the future. It is through the lens of the present that we address every question, which means that, except for the most circumscribed topics, we seldom produce definitive answers; instead we tend to offer arguments and interpretations that work for our moment, to be improved by the knowledge and perspectives of our successors. Anticipating that conversation with the scholars of the future, we send off the fruits of our research hopefully to posterity. This Colloquy aims to render hope where the present meets the future.
