THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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technology can have any contact with the production of physical processes or not: at this moment the problem of a natural subject which can be mediated with us
emerges from the mere regulative addition to mechanics. The definition does not of course become as strict as mechanics even then, but more serious than the latter: for
the problem of a concrete technology consists precisely in not allowing de­organization and its consequences to refer to a void. As questionable as it remains whether a
subject of nature already exists as realized, this subject must just as certainly be left open as a driving predisposition, and furthermore as one which thoroughly works
into all its realizations. But at this point there now arises — without any Kantian regulative element, if not theologizing ‘additional thinking’ — Leibniz's problem of
energy: what he called ‘inquiétude poussante’. Leibniz posits it as the nuclear intensity of all monads and at the same time as the explicating tendency of this nucleus of
theirs itself. There is thus a combination here of the sharpness of Leibniz's equation of energy and that ‘inwardness’ of the monads which signifies subjectness in the
objective sense as dynamic natural determination. The problem of the subject in nature is of course pluralized in Leibniz into a host of individual monads, but in this host
the prototype of all this: the old natura naturans, is still clearly discernible. Animism may remain wholly absent here and no less the ‘psychological’ element as well in
Leibniz's individual points on the problem of the subject. But the fact that Leibniz's equation of energy and subjectriess retains its relative meaning, even if the utterly
false combination of energy and the psychological element is omitted, is indicated by Lenin himself in an extraordinarily profound remark: ‘There is indeed a subjective
factor in the concept of energy which does not exist in the concept of motion, for example’ (‘Philosophical Notebooks’). Not even the so indubitable subject of human
history exists as already realized of course, although it increasingly manifests itself in empirical­organic terms, and above all in empirical­social terms as working man.
How much more therefore may that which is hypothetically described as the nature­subject still have to be a predisposition and latency; for the concept of a dynamic
subject in nature is in the final instance a synonym for the not yet manifested That­impulse (the most immanent material agent) in the real as a whole (cf. Vol. I, p. 307).
In this stratum therefore, in the materially most immanent one that exists at all, lies the truth of that which is described as the subject of nature. Just as the old concept of
natura naturans, which first of all signified a subject of nature, is of course still half­mythical, as noted above, but by