 Regarding the first question about the justification of hope, one of the earliest and most ambitious accounts can be found in Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. Bloch advances his argument in the context of a debate in early 20th-century Marxism, distinguishing between what he calls the “cold” and the “warm stream”: The first designates the materialist insight that all historical developments are conditioned and constrained by concrete, existing material conditions, “strict determinations that cannot be skipped over” (Bloch [1954–59] 1986: I:208), whereas the second acknowledges a processual constitution of reality which is captured by hope. Hope, in other words, is justified by its correctly grasping facts about the world. In particular, Bloch describes hope as always related to the “not-yet-conscious” that in turn reflects “objective possibilities”. This idea is related to Bloch’s processual metaphysics, according to which objective tendencies and possibilities interact with “closed” matters of fact, such that the moment of potentiality surpassing into actuality always opens up opportunities for the interventions of active decision-making. The right way to relate to these opportunities is, according to Bloch, “militant optimism”, i.e., not a mere assumption that things will develop in a desirable direction, but an active attitude towards real tendencies with the goal to realize them (Bloch [1954–59] 1986: I:201). Arguing from these premises, Bloch develops an integrated theory in which hope is not merely a subjective combination of desires and beliefs about probabilities or facts, but rather a reflection of metaphysical possibilities in the world and part of a range of human capacities that make it possible to relate to that which is not yet, but which is already prefigured in the objective potentials of reality.