THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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up the path to the vaults of the heavens, and the vaults themselves now circle with the gods themselves around the great Being, colourless and without form and
intangible’. The love of wisdom looks up there, a dialectical vision in so far as it embraces, above all in the ‘Parmenides’, certain opposites like the Many and the One,
the unlike and the like and is not also, as in Heraclitus, an objective dialectics through the totality of the world. Instead the whole world remains in a dualism of two
spheres, of which the upper one merely shines into the dark space of the lower one. Though also associates with all its geometrical figures and quantitative­qualitative
types within it, offering that beauty which still goes into the neo­Platonism of Faust's monologue:‘How heavenly powers rise and then descend,/To each their golden
pails extend!/With fragrant blessings winging/From heaven through the earth all swinging,/Through universe harmonious ringing.’* This kind of thing remains monistic in
Goethe despite all transparency, with an embracing or rather vanquishing of every echo of an image of two worlds by Spinoza's spacious natura sive deus. In Plato,
however, the Jacob's ladder landscape and later church­window landscape of the world is clearly one from light to night, from night to light. In Plato the world is totally
inexplicable in terms of itself, indeed does not exist at all in itself, as empty space: only μέθεξις, accepting participation in the ideas, and πα оνσíα,
communicating currency of the ideas, give things their characteristics, their types, their palm­like, leonine quality, beauty, and goodness high up. And in a cloudy form, in
mere imitation, compared with the pure Jacob's ladder, of the pyramid of ideas rising with ever truer Being to ever higher perfection. After all, its apex is supposed to
be the idea of goodness, as the sole and final definition projecting into the mystically indefinite element of the highest Being. At the same time this idea is supposed to be
the purposive cause of the whole methexis and parusia, herewith reverting to the strong wishful character which, as we have seen, accompanied Plato's apparently so
contemplative vision from the start, with longing, Eros, and Agon. From this standpoint, from the standpoint of the supreme idea of goodness (Plato calls it, not without
purposive cause itself, τòμέγ στо μ θημα, his most important piece of instruction) Plato's reforming activity seeks to justify itself,
together with the hierarchical utopia, as does his momentous equation of ever higher perfection with ever more existing Being and vice versa. The latter equation is even
supposed to make the wishful landscape of Platonism into an ever — more real one, the higher it rises into the ether of
* ‘Faust’, Part I, 449–53.
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