THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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is a different one from the slow development of nature. Only the starting point is moved back, only fewer and fewer ‘finished products’ of nature are used as raw
materials. But however bold the new formation, water, air and earth at least remain indispensable. However synthetic the chemistry, no cornfield will grow on the flat of
the hand, which is to say: the link with what has prevailed, which can only be better managed when allied with itself, still does not come to an end here. This is even
more true of the experiment which advances far more precariously than synthetic chemistry: of possible radiation technology; of the problem as to how classical
mechanics is to be abandoned technologically as well, and how machines are to be established on the non­Euclidean margin. Even then the forces used remain derived
from nature, although from a particularly sinister fund: and the process whereby new work­transformers are built into previously undreamt­of effective powers and
miracles can by no means remain disparate to the impulse­matter in the non­Euclidean segment of nature. Secondly though: even more false than an abstract omission of
raw materials is an omission of what has differently prevailed: of the natural laws. It is a purely subjectivist state of affairs if the laws are merely regarded as ‘imaginary
things’, and especially as fictitious ‘models’, in accordance with which a succession or a simultaneity of perceptions is arranged ‘with economy of thought’. This fideism
then of course reveals, in all its variations, a particularly loudmouthed and ostensible freedom in the object space which has been idealized away. A freedom à la
Simmel with regard to history, since ‘the mind itself maps out its shores and the rhythm of its waves’. But then also a freedom à la Bertrand Russell with regard to
nature and its laws, as supposedly ‘purely logical structures which consist of events, i.e. perceptions’; according to which these laws certainly reflected nothing real that
exists independently of methodical consciousness. The consequence for technology here would be that the de­organization, still projecting in a dangerously ungraphic
fashion as it is, would now completely end up in no man's land. It is true, however, that all recognized laws reflect objective­real conditional connections between
processes, and human beings are thoroughly embedded in this element independent of their consciousness and will, yet capable of being mediated with their
consciousness and will. All theorists have pointed out this both insuppressible and helpful objective character of these laws: of the economic laws of concrete
construction, but also of the naturalistic laws of the technology which serves it. Not so that men should become slaves of these laws and make a fetish of them, but
rather so that even in Marxist terms, precisely in