Esperançar o presente: sobre futuros inéditos e viáveis

Abstract

The article discusses how the crisis of modern progress and the diagnosis of the Anthropocene put hope back at the center of contemporary ethical and political debate. Starting with Krenak, it contrasts futuristic Western temporalities with existential horizons that open up the present as a space for action. It dialogues with authors such as Han, Eagleton and Waldow, Berguès and Chandler, showing that current hope is “gloomy”, distinct from optimism and oriented towards action in the now. The text then confronts Paulo Freire and Ernst Bloch: although both think of hope as opening up the “not yet”, Bloch tends towards a cosmological and speculative utopia, criticized by Eagleton, while Freire insists on the empirical, situated and pedagogical roots of hope. For Freire, hope is a historical, critical and collective practice, which produces “viable unprecedentedness”, avoiding both fatalism and abstract utopianism. The article shows that his pedagogy operates as a politics of time, linking past, present and future without determinism. It concludes that this concrete hope - existential, critical and oriented towards the present - offers ethical and political alternatives to face contemporary impasses without capitulating to cynicism or resorting to apocalyptic or escapist illusions.