THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 748
methodically synonymous with uncovering, with removing the cover, and beneath this cover there then lie the findings for the mapping out of an allegedly fixed being. A
strenuous counterexample to the inventor or homo faber has finally even been supplied by phenomenology à la Scheler and in fact — because of the purely accepting
element in this phenomenology — in favour of the explorer or discoverer, as the epitome of the homo contemplativus. Here the difference between inventor and
discoverer is frankly stated to be one between modern and medieval ‘disposition’, further still: an attempt is made to explain it by a process as remote from inventing or
discovering as that of election. When the modern homo faber elects a Member of Parliament or President, it is only the votes of the majority that make them so; they
are created, electing is here producing. Whereas when the German king was elected by a majority of freemen, and then of the Electors, he was not created — at least
according to the fiction and also the ideology —, but he is merely found out and revealed as an already existing ‘secret king’; electing is here discovering. And this is
also the way, mutatis mutandis, the phenomenologist as discoverer wants to keep things: essential objects are viewed singly and thus presented to the mind; the only
active element here is the ‘selection’ which emphasizes parts, sides, factors of overall objective reality for attention or not as the case may be. This is a strange
epistemology, an utterly reactionary one, directed against changing the world, but one which underlines the difference between invention and discovery, or finding,
through its hatred of all acts of intervention and new formation. The discoverer therefore appears inactive all along the line, he seems as contemplative as he does
conservative, in contrast to the inventor. And there is also undoubtedly a sharpness of contrast in the average bourgeois consciousness as soon as it thinks about the
disposition of an Edison, say, or about the disposition of a traveller to the North Pole. Despite the fact that, as mentioned above, the inventor mostly presupposes the
discoverer, indeed that an inventing which is ignorant of existing circumstances and laws before it overturns them will remain fruitless or at best will only reach its goal by
chance, and then not the one intended. Despite the instructive ambivalence which is already present in linguistic usage, when it recognizes not only a geographical
discoverer, that is, a discoverer of something that has long existed, but also a discoverer of artificial indigo or of Salvarsan.* Also despite that existence which, as it
belongs to a world capable of change and by no means static, very often
* Arsenical compound for the treatment of syphilis.