THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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again, not without a very differently obscure, namely reactionary brief, but apart from this not without the strength of the memory that precisely in the striving, volitional,
dynamic element of Leibniz's tendency there lies something other than the mere logos of the Ratio. Hence Schelling's distinction between the positing, volitional That­
oddash iota iota iota
element and the rational What­element in process (indicated in Aristotelian terms as the difference between the τ and the δ óτ ,
expressed in scholastic terms as the difference between the quodditas and the quidditas). ‘The first Be­ing, this primum existens, is therefore at the same time the first
contingent element (original contingency). This whole construction therefore begins with the genesis of the first contingent element — what is unlike itself —, it begins
with a dissonance and probably must begin in this way’ (Schelling, Werke X, p. 101). If we leave aside the ‘falling away’ mythology, added to this by Schelling, of this
first Being, an incalculable process element is certainly considered along with the intensity factor of process conceived as Böhme's ‘non­ground’. For if the growth of
cosmic brightness as such only had rational elements, then there would be nothing at all which hastened growth with an intensive agency. Furthermore, if the process did
not have to produce and to manifest something which is by no means already ab ovo quidditas, there would be no process at all either, in fact there would not even be
Leibniz's category of relation in it. Instead of this, and especially instead of the differences in brightness within a purely logical quidditas, there would be no differences
and connections at all, but the collapse of all relations into processless identity. As is also wholly consistently the case in Spinoza's total rationalism in accordance with
its radical elimination of process. But how significantly even the concept of process in Bëhme ultimately stems from a darkly intensive upward struggle and its aurora;
how conspicuously both a healing process and a judicial process are encompassed in the whole category of process, how both are referred to something negative
which is to be healed and corrected by means of process. And the process in each of these forms must — be gained; for it refers back to something unfinished,
something which ought not to be, which forms the foundation of this process without this process being founded on it. Which is why Hegel in particular — as remote as
he was from Scheíling's Irratio, and however much the latter criticized him in particular — certainly adopted and recognized the old Böhmean ‘resistance’ from the
standpoint of a non­ground. And which is moreover why Leibniz's intentions towards dialectics were so dynamically sharpened by Hegel, namely by transferring the
process­driving agent into negation. Because the latter, as ‘a nocturnal and turning