THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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and they are nowhere more certainly correlative to one another than in the society of thorough abstractness. As far as the latter is concerned with respect to the essence
of nature, as everybody knows it has become incomparably greater since Bunsen, Helmholtz, Einstein, and Heisenberg; this is the other side of the otherwise so
blossoming and bold new physics. The relativization of social connections and of the previous industrial calculation is reflected in the decay of all and every concrete
relation to nature whatsoever. On the one hand, subjective idealism thus gains ground, Berkeley in physics, above all in England, where it has never died out. On the
other hand, that of nature, even conceivable reality is ostensibly extinguished, not merely visual reality; the unmediatedness with natura naturans makes itself into a
methodical point of honour and absolute at all events. These are the reflexes of a disintegrating society, of its crisis and of its own chaotic nature; they appear in the way
it divides its physics in half. In the way it isolates it far from every microcosm­macrocosm relationship and especially far from the dialectics of nature, from the physical
subject­object relationship. But neo­Berkeleyism has become the furthest thing of all to efficacity and seed, with interpretations which contain no statement of the
philosophy of nature at all but simply a sociological one, so that the agnosticism and also the chaotic world of jeans and Eddington, of Mach and Russell belong to late
capitalist ideology, not to the philosophy of nature. Thus total alienation from the content of nature doubly makes technology into a trick, doubly stresses the relation
between eternally veiled nature and eternally chained giant. De­organization, as the transition of technology into regions of nature ever more remote from human beings,
has further reinforced the abstractness of technology. And with it, in an ever more precarious way, its homelessness; apart from the social basis, radiation machines now
also lack a physically familiar basis. If, therefore, de­organization itself is to obtain the desired additional forces concretely from the world, then this surplus must not
only extend into the graphic but into the non­superficial, consequently again and again: in mediation with a no longer mythical natura naturans. The social­political
freedom which takes the societal causes in hand thus continues in a natural­political way. After all, this mediation is the technological and natural­philosophical
counterpart of what Engels calls, in the relation of human beings to human beings, the leap out of the realm of necessity into that of freedom. Engels thoroughly stresses
the parallel between merely external social and physical necessity: ‘The socially effective forces operate just like the forces of nature: blindly, violently, destructively, as
long as we do not recognize them and do not