THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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other words, it means breaking free from the common view which sees in nature only what happens — sees at most action as a fact, not the action itself within
action’ (Werke I, 3, p. 13). Whereas therefore in the usual view the original productivity of nature disappears in face of the product, in the philosophically concrete
view the product must disappear in the face of productivity. Schelling and Hegel of course cause the history of the manifestation of nature to land in existing man, in fact
at the conversion point of the historical beginning, and Hegel even more so than Schelling, who at least still sees in the ‘varied and intricate monograms of objects’ an
undeciphered meaning, one which has not yet properly brightened in the human mind. In Hegel, nature, ‘a bacchanalian god who does not restrain and compose
himself’, is already thoroughly restrained, composed and cancelled out in existing history, in such a way that no substantial traces remain within it whatever. This totally
antiquarian explanation of natural productivity and its products in terms of the past and Becomeness is clearly different from the approach to the root of nature intended
elsewhere in Schelling and Hegel; and approaching this root has no productive sense itself if it has withered. But in reality it has neither withered nor is human history in
its corporeality, background and above all in its technology, obliged to nature only as one that is past. On the contrary: finally manifested nature lies just the same as
finally manifested history in the horizon of the future, and the mediation categories of concrete technology which can well be expected in the future also run towards this
horizon alone. The more a technology of alliance in particular were to become possible instead of the superficial one, a technology of alliance mediated with the coproductivity
of nature, the more certainly the creative forces of a frozen nature will be released again. Nature is no bygone, but the building site which has not yet been
cleared at all, the building material which does not yet adequately exist at all for the human house which does not yet adequately exist at all. The ability of the
problematic natural subject to help to create this house is in fact the objective­utopian correlate of the humane­utopian imagination, a concrete imagination. Therefore it
is certain that the human house not only stands in history and on the foundation of human activity, it also stands above all on the foundation of a mediated natural subject
and on the building site of nature. A borderline concept for the latter is not the beginning of human history where nature (which has constantly been present during
history, surrounding it) switches into the site of the regnum hominis, but into the proper one, and rises in an unalienated way, as mediated good.