THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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just in his paintings: ‘The laws of nature compel the painter to transform himself into the spirit of nature and to make himself the mediator between nature and art.’ With
the Renaissance dimension recalled by Marx himself, a fact itself worth recalling over and over again, in his ‘Holy Family’: ‘Among the properties innate in matter,
motion is the first and most excellent, not just mechanical and mathematical motion, but even more the drive, living spirit, tension, and the torment — to use Jakob
Böhme's expression — of matter.’ This with all caution towards the numerous mythical traces in the concept of a gushing substratum, and indeed towards a pantheistic
bogeyman which could likewise still haunt the concept of a natura naturans. Whether in its poorly cleansed entrances and forecourts, or by virtue of the ‘theological
inconsistencies’ of which Marx also speaks in the passage cited above, even with reference to Bacon. Nevertheless, the difference between bourgeois­technological
alienness to nature, especially unworldliness, and affinitive inhabitation of nature is crystal clear: natura naturans can be set on its feet, physical nihilism definitely cannot.
Thus the problem of a centrally mediated relation to nature becomes the most urgent: the days of the mere exploiter, of the outwitter, of the mere taker of opportunities
are numbered even in technological terms. Bourgeois technology as a whole was a type of outwitter, and the so­called exploitation of natural forces was not primarily
related, any more than that of human beings, to the concrete material of what was exploited, or interested in being indigenous to it. But precisely activity beyond what
has become, this so wonderfully strong impulse in technology, needs contact with the objective­concrete forces and tendencies; it is the techologically intended ‘supernaturation’
of nature itself which demands inhabitation in nature. Prometheus, when he fetched fire from heaven to animate his human creations with it, stole not only fire
but — according to a phrase of Plato's in the ‘Protagoras’ which aims at all or nothing — also ‘the ingenious wisdom of Hephaestos and of Athene’, in order to give it
to men together with fire. And the more technology loses the final traces of its old rootedness, or rather the more it gains new rootedness wherever it wants to, in the
synthetic production of raw materials, in the radiation industry and whatever else in magnificent hubris: the more intimately and centrally the mediation with the
interpolated system of nature must develop.
Only then can things also be changed at their root cause, instead of merely displaced from outside. Every technological intervention contains the will for change, without
however the X of what is to be changed having to be familiar to the mere outwitter, or even having to exist. An agent of the phenomena is of course admitted, but only
as one which is