Nel cuore dell’impossibile: educare alla speranza, abitare la frattura

In an era marked by disenchantment and a collective imaginary saturated with narra- tives of collapse—environmental, social, existential—this essay offers a critical and genealogical reflection on hope as an ontological stance, an anthropological category, and an educational imperative. Far from being a consolatory refuge, hope is explored in its constitutive ambivalence: a force that endures within the heart of fracture, a ges- ture that defies evidence, a question that keeps the threshold of the possible open. Beginning with a reappraisal of Greek thought—from Aeschylus and Plato to Lucian of Samosata and Spinoza—the essay reveals how hope was perceived as a deceptive illusion or subtle poison, embodying an unresolved tension between enchantment and disillusionment. In contrast, the Hebrew and Christian traditions—from Isaiah to Paul, from Hannah Arendt to Carlo Bo—reframe this tension in terms of a vigilant and embodied expectation, capable of grounding a renewed ethic of responsibility. Through the analysis of sacred texts, philosophical insights, and educational perspec- tives, hope emerges as a radical counter-conduct: an act of resistance against spiritual anaesthesia, a guardianship of the future in the night of the present, a pedagogy of the impossible that does not merely predict but inhabits and transforms. Ultimately, the essay asks what kind of formation might render hope visible—in humble gestures, in daily care, in the slow and silent construction of a world still possible.