THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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a nihilistic lack of contact then follow inescapably from the absence of the geographically objective line of extension. As high as this line ultimately presumes to aspire to
borderline ideals, like the earthly paradise of Columbus, its negation leads just as terribly into total isolation of human goals on earth, in the world, and beyond this it
leads into the void. Above all in the second half of the nineteenth century, a boundless centrifugal sense of the universe, without the weightiness of earth in it,
predominantly generated a sense of forlornness. The human devaluation called capitalism was thus ideologically strengthened by the quantitative devaluation of the
human arena in general, which is simply termed the ocean of the world. This is seen most clearly in Schopenhauer, concerning the alleged paltriness of the little earth: ‘In
infinite space countless shining spheres, around each of which about a dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, which, though hot inside, are covered with a cold
congealed crust, on which a layer of mould has produced living and discerning beings:­ this is the empirical truth, reality, the world’ (Werke, Grisebach, II, p. 9). The
optimism of Copernican infinity in Giordano Bruno and in Spinoza still had room for man, precisely in his ‘eroico furore’ in the one case, and in his ‘amor dei (sive
naturae) intellectualis’ in the other; the nihilism of the declining bourgeoisie, however, by making life on earth into a dead end, causes the humane geographical
dimension to be completely devalued in the astronomical one, without containing any point of reference of its own. And this therefore remains, through the mistrust of
the Humanum in the world, the extreme consequence of the chosen geographical dead end. In contrast to the consequence of the chosen line of extension, which, if it
allows a glimpse into distant earthly shores, intends reception and homeland there. That there is thus on this earth simultaneously the space for a new one and that not
only time but also space contains its utopia within it: this is what the outlines of a better world suggest as far as a geographical Eldorado­Eden is concerned. The bodies
and houses, electric power stations and St Mark's churches ultimately also belong to earthly matter and its organization; they are embraced by the whole of the earth
and penetrate with their own utopia into the geographical one. Above all the architectural spatial utopia is as such also one of the earth; and the wishful landscapes
which art reveals, if not through buildings then through the windows of painting or literature, even as wishful landscapes are nevertheless still simply — landscapes.
Eldorado­Eden therefore comprehensively embraces the other outlined utopias; even the broadly transcendent element, the ‘house of the other side’, still had a place in
the horizon of the earth. Indeed even where the