THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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ever. The sound dream actively follows what is historically due and under way in a more or less hindered fashion. Concrete utopia is therefore concerned to understand
the dream of its object exactly, a dream which lies in the historical trend itself. As a utopia mediated with process, it is concerned to deliver the forms and contents
which have already developed in the womb of present society. Utopia in this no longer abstract sense is thus the same as realistic anticipation of what is good; which
must have become clear. There is processive­concrete utopia in both basic elements of the reality discerned by Marxism: in its tendency, the tension of what is due
though hindered, and in its latency, the correlate of the not yet realized objective­real possibilities in the world. Wherever so much is constructed into the mediated­blue,
a utopian ground is required; if it did not exist, nothing of value could be created. Every dream of a better, of a higher, of a fulfilled life would be confined to a separate,
inner, slender, and quite mysteriously isolated enclave. But a great suggesting and an intending of the still unarrived runs through the whole world: concrete utopia is the
most important theory­practice of this tendency. Accordingly, utopian intention is confined neither to the mere inner dream­enclave nor to the problems of the best
social constitution either. On the contrary, its field is broad in social terms, it has all the object worlds of human work in its favour, it extends — as must be remembered
and as is to be demonstrated in what follows — no less into technology and architecture, into painting, literature and music, into ethics and religion. There are
technological wishful images as well as social ones, they are not inferior to these in boldness, and have always been intertwined with them, in so far as they push back
the barriers of nature and fashion a world for us. And every work of art, every central philosophy had and has a utopian window in which there lies a landscape which
is still developing. Even natural forms, apart from what they are as forms that have become, constitute a cipher in which a Not­Yet­Become, an object­based utopian
element circulates, which is first only present as a latent form; natural beauty, and also natural mythology gave and give access to these real­utopian ciphers. Just as a
Not­Yet­Conscious, which has never been conscious before, dawns in the human soul, so a Not­Yet­Become dawns in the world: at the head of the world­process
and world­whole is this Front and the vast, still so little understood category of the Novum. Its contents are not merely those that have not appeared, but those that are
not decided, they dawn in mere real possibility, and contain the danger of possible disaster, but also the hope of possible, still not thwarted happiness, capable of