Stanford Humanities Center
My daughter is eighteen months old. She moves at warp speed, with a hunger for all that is new. Her favorite word is – more to see, more to do, more of this book, more of that song. More joy, more blueberries, more big trucks. The enthusiasm is equal parts endearing and exhausting to the two parents (+ a village) who chase her up the big-kid jungle gym, grab her hand as she learns what it is to run, replace the 1,000 books she pulled off the shelves in the library.
This was supposed to be a meditation on where hope appears in my work. Instead, I find myself thinking about the hope I feel as I watch my tiny human, full of wonder, figure out how to move in the world.
Anatomized,
Perhaps this is not so different from what is hopeful about the thing we do. There is the intoxicating feeling of a research question yet unanswered; the promise of a blank page or a new archive; the thrill of a conversation, with colleagues, that prompts you to revisit your work through fresh eyes. At the same time, we are joined in the conviction that knowledge must evolve. We seek to intervene. We also recognize that today’s contributions will be superseded in the tomorrows to come – by new voices, new methods, new evidence, new questions.
I find this a comforting thought: that the toddler and the scholar have embarked on parallel journeys. Jungle gyms and archives. and discarded drafts. New words and Curiosity + growth = hope.
Join the colloquy
Join the colloquy
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.
