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different discourse from that of ‘patient hope’. In his own terms, this is ‘the discourse
of those who refuse to settle’ (2007a, p. 26). Like Bloch before him, Freire suggests
that hope is born of the ‘No’ to deprivation, the ‘resounding obscenity’ of injustice
driving an incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by this injustice (Freire, 2007a, p.
22; 1972b, p. 64). Hope becomes an unsettled yearning (Freire, 1972b, p. 20) experi-
enced at the level of one’s very being: ‘I feel my incompleteness inside me, at the biolog-
ical, affective, critical, and intellectual levels, an incompleteness that pushes me
constantly’ (Freire, 1985, pp. 197–198). Here one finds parallels once again between
Freire and Moltmann, for whom hope is experienced in the affective domain as ‘passion-
ate suffering and passionate longing’ which manifests in the behavioural domain as
‘the criticism of present misery’ (Moltmann, 1967, p. 16; 1970, pp. 114–115). Freire
too talks of hope as a stabbing, sickening response to existential reality that pushes the
hoper forward in anger, indignation and ‘just rage’, compelling them to negate the nega-
tive (Freire, 1993). Hope thus becomes, not patient and serene, but enraged and critical.
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Freire is at pains to emphasise, however, that hope on its own is not enough
(Freire, 1994, pp. 2–3). Just as spontaneous hope, by virtue of its naivety, can become
fixated on some distorted or ideologically manipulated objective, so too hope as an
activity can take mistaken forms. On the one hand, hope may manifest as a passive
‘absolute patience’ while on the other it may take the form of a naïve and unfocused
rebelliousness (Freire, 1996, p. 34). Because such impatient hope is at risk of ‘losing
its bearings’, hope needs to be bolstered by careful attention to ‘concrete, material
data’ (Freire, 1994, pp. 2–3). What Freire variously refers to as vain, frivolous and
irresponsible hope is more commonly termed ‘false hope’, characterised by a fervour
that pays little heed to the realities of a situation and is liable to lead to frustration,
disappointment and despair (Bovens, 1999; Clarke, 2003; Drahos, 2004; Polivy &
Herman, 2000). Macquarrie refers to this as ‘the pathology of hope’, in which hope
runs riot and loses its grip on reality, while Mittleman suggests that the recklessness
associated with false hope means ‘the end is usually terror’ (Macquarrie, 1978, p. 15;
Mittleman, 2009, p. 260). For Freire, the hope of the ‘inveterate dreamer’ is precisely
such a reckless false hope, an over-zealous hope that fails to consider ‘contrary forces’
and ends up, if not in terror, then through frustration only immobilising itself (Freire,
1998, p. 26; 2007b, p. 64; 1996, p. 194). The language of hope and possibility is thus
‘the restrained language’ of those who refuse to lose their grip on reality (Freire,
2007b, p. 59). This is the language of ‘sound’ and ‘sober’ hope, an educated hope
grounded in a careful study of concrete material data (Bovens, 1999; Godfrey, 1987;
Mittleman, 2009).
A rather different interpretation, however, suggests that a truly progressive and
transformative hope must be a ‘hope against the evidence’ (Lingis, 2002, p. 23) and
‘hope in spite of reality’ (Waterworth, 2004, p. 63). In a powerful rendering of this line
of argument, Richard Rorty talks of the need to ‘substitute hope for knowledge’ and
argues that the hope required of progressive educators is a ‘romantic hope’ (1999,
p. 88). For Rorty, ‘humans have to dream up the point of human life’, and to hope is
to stop worrying about whether one’s dreams are ‘well grounded’ and to worry instead
about whether they have the capacity to ‘astonish and exhilarate’ (Rorty, 1999, pp. 28,
34). The proper objective of hope is a ‘shared utopian dream’, and its cognitive–affec-
tive dimensions comprise a profound confidence in the capacity of human beings to
construct, both imaginatively and materially, new ways of organising life (Rorty, 1998,
p. 106; 1999, p. 208). For Rorty, romantic hope is ‘taking the world by the throat and
insisting that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined’ (Rorty, 1998, p. 138).