THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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absolutely unrelated to us, alienated from us, and as one without a subject. Children and primitive people automatically insert a subject, corresponding to their own ego,
into physical events. And less naively, less directly analogous to the individual ego, a subject is also to be found in later non­animistic conceptions of nature, provided
that they are not quantitative. This is already the case with Thales when he ascribes a soul to the magnet, and it is the case in a big way in all panvitalist images of nature,
in Leonardo, Bruno, and in the early Schelling. But a subject, in the empirical­organic sense, is fundamentally lacking — and this was a great advance at first compared
with all animism — in the quantitative view of the world, and therefore also in classical mechanics. It is completely lacking where quantitative thinking totally passes into
thinking which is theoretical in terms of relation and function: in non­Euclidean mechanics nature becomes an absolutely free­floating association of (relativized) laws.
Kant admittedly based the physical association of laws on a ‘transcendental’ subject, as he did with every combination (‘The I think must be able to accompany all my
ideas’); and this would not of course be introducing a subject into the mechanics of nature,, but rather a hopeless subject into the mechanical concepts of nature.
However, the latter subject is, as a so­called transcendental one, least of all an empirical­organic one; nature is here rather something to which an empirical­organic
subject can only be added in the mind, though it can be added in the mind; in other words, the extreme ‘objectivity’ attained by Newton's natural science does not so
exhaust nature in Kant that there is no room for basic concepts of a less alienated kind as well in his view of nature, even though only conceivable, regulative, and not
scientifically constitutive room. These basic concepts are above all ‘those of an inner purpose of nature, with the final purpose of a realm of rational beings’; but this
introduces, with an undoubtedly still cloudy teleology, a conceivable natural subject. The causal explanation is thus supposed to be supplemented by the inevitable,
although only regulative definition according to a capacity immanent in nature which could pursue its causes as purposive causes. Which in analogy to the human type of
will goes to prove that we ‘conceive of nature as technological through its own capacity; whereas, if we do not attribute such a type of effect to it, its causality would
have to be represented as a blind mechanism’ (Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werke, Hartenstein, V, p. 372). Kant still had no or very few technological viewpoints, and
therefore the cited as­if definitions were also aimed far more at organic than at inorganic nature. But as soon as the problem arises as to whether the eminent
expediencies of human