THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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to that which is conscientious, what it has in it itself as its most radical intention: the end of intention, the infinity of content, not of the path. The will of utopia is on the
right path only when it does not allow the elevation to higher spheres to be blocked by temporary cases of fulfilment, yet believes just as rigorously in an end, time­stop,
arrival. When it believes in nothing more than the objectively founded possibility of this arrival, but therefore also in the power to hasten it and not to renounce it for the
sake of the path. Precisely the final form of the highest moment, which Faust increasingly sought and of course continues to make eventful in heaven, as something still
insufficient: precisely this final form has no higher sphere above it any longer, indeed no sphere at all any more alongside others. Dante's land of legend gives the densely
successful rose, Faust's land gives mountains above mountains in the outspread blue — in the former the mystery is the existing solution, in the latter the solution is the
still remaining mystery.
Splendour, Elysium in opera and oratorio
Sound hovers, it is not clear where it is located. Equally it is not very plain what it expresses, completely different words have been set to the same tune. Yet a sound
can also express better than any colour or words that transition where we no longer know whether it is a lament or a consolation. Music on the whole does not stick at
it, certainly not in a major key, but not in a minor key either. It has a totally lonely but long­drawn­out, undying light in the pain it states, and for seriousness it has a song
which covers even the hardest step of the grave* as one towards hope. The fact that music exists at all, as a path or way out pre­figured nowhere else, shines through
and already surpasses the materials to which it turns. To which it turns in a searching, hovering fashion though, so that the solution is not yet binding; except for a few
great musical statements. The path of music is longer than that of painting, and even that of poetry; thus it is by no means as objective as other arts, although referring far
more intensively to objects which do not lie in the horizon of sensations and ideas but of emotions. But at the same time, since all emotions are pressing for a solution,
this means that, of all the arts, music is most geared to this and, by virtue of the consoling character of its hovering above, most powerfully capable of giving a preappearance
of outflow. Though also in a most carefree way, at least in the form of music
* This is grave in the musical sense.