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refuses to recognise a separation between the cognitive and affective domains of human
existence and regards hope, like knowledge, as an experience of the entire body,
involving emotions, desires, dreams, thought processes and intuitions (Freire, 1993,
p. 90; 2007b, p. 94). Far from being a learned (or not learned) thinking pattern, hope
for Freire is ‘an essential component’ of the human condition such that ‘it is impossible
to exist without it’ (1998a, p. 69; 1994, p. 72). Crucially, as a phenomenon that is always
and already present in the human condition, the role of education is not conceived as
one of instilling hope but rather of evoking it and providing it with guidance.
One need not adopt an overly undifferentiated notion of ‘continental philosophy’
to see that his understanding of hope as an ontological dimension of the human condi-
tion places Freire within this tradition. Whereas debates within analytical philosophy
tend on the whole to treat hope as a ‘desiderative–calculative’ activity (Godfrey, 1987)
comprising a desire plus a probability estimate (Day, 1991), philosophers such as
Bloch (1995), Marcel (1962), Pieper (1997) and Sartre (1996) regard hope as the driv-
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ing force of human life, propelling us along the path to ourselves. Freire belongs
firmly in the latter camp, being far less concerned to analyse probability estimates
pertaining to individual hopes (espoir) than to study and evoke the more fundamental
hope (espérance) that makes individual hopes possible and gives them meaning.
The notion of homo viator is significant here, both within Freire’s work and within
the philosophy of hope more generally. This notion of the itinerant condition of exist-
ence, of the human being as traveller or wayfarer, is neatly summarised by John
Macquarrie when he claims ‘that man is not yet himself and is on the way to fulfilment
of what he has in him to become’ (1978, p. 23). In this condition of status viatoris
(Pieper, 1997, p. 91), as we continually travel ‘the path to ourselves’ (Bloch, 1995,
p. 934), ‘being necessarily means “being-on-the-way”’ (Marcel, 1962, p. 11) and
‘man is taken to be a wayfarer… always and essentially en route’ (Dauenhauer, 1986,
pp. 6–7). Each of these themes is incorporated into Freire’s conceptualisation of
humans as ‘unfinished’ beings (1998a, p. 51), ‘beings in the process of becoming’
(1972b, pp. 56–57), conscious of their incompleteness and their status as travellers,
seekers, searchers, pilgrims.
Hope is of fundamental importance in all of this. For Freire, humans are ‘eternal
seekers. Eternal because of hope’ (1998a, p. 58). Without hope, humans would despair
in the face of their unfinishedness and would become immobilised. It is hope that acts
as the ‘necessary impetus in the context of our unfinishedness’, ‘stimulating the
pilgrim’ and ‘leading the incessant pursuit of humanity’ (Freire, 1998a, p. 69; 1985,
p. 127; 1972b, p. 64). It is hope, in other words, that drives us ever onwards as travellers,
wayfarers, seekers, in pursuit of completeness. And it is in this pursuit of completeness,
this hope-driven search that characterises the human condition, that the necessity and
necessarily political nature of education is to be found. For because we search, we are
driven to explore, interrogate, question and learn, thus becoming educable. Indeed, ‘the
matrixes of hope are matrixes of the very educability of beings, of human beings’
(Freire, 2007a, p. 87). And because we are unfinished, and thus become as we learn,
the education rendered necessary by our educability attains its political character:

The real roots of the political nature of education are to be found in the educability of the
human person. This educability, in turn, is grounded in the radical unfinishedness of the
human condition and in our consciousness of this unfinished state. (Freire, 1998a, p. 100)