THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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character by the formal driving­to­an­end of logical consistency and the architectonic­total kind in the system. Alleviated because the logical consistency incorporates
the volitional­emotional kind, like the steam of the locomotive which carries off the hot gases and thus promotes the draught in the boiler. The perspective of a utopiancompleted
kind is concealed by the rounding off — interrupted almost only in Kant — of a closed system in the fabric of doctrines of philosophy elaborated along pre­
Marxist lines; which is why that which is distinguished as the ‘authentic’ appeared both as ready existing and as factually closed, and therefore without Front and
Novum. The old spell of Platonic anamnesis is again at work throughout here, the theory that all learning is only a re­remembering of what was seen long ago and That­
Which­Timelessly­Is; this antiquarian spell also conceals in the shape of the closed system the by no means antiquarian element in each perspective on to the ‘authentic’
or essence. Yet this perspective as such exists everywhere, and in fact: it is, sub specie toto, sub specie aeternitatis, one in which one of the great archetypes of the
world as a whole (motion, rest, ocean of matter, light, crystal) is boosted into an image of the end, an image of perfection. Thus Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus
came close, as did Bruno and Spinoza, and Leibniz in a different way — nothing but putting the world, in various sectors or even fronts, to the test of essence. And
above all in the already always sorrowless and daybright materialism, in Bruno's world­tree, in Spinoza's midday crystal there rises the self­perfecting consciousness,
there rises the critical optative: If only it were so! If only the world were as full of enthusiasm as in Bruno, as full of shadowless crystallization as in Spinoza! If only this
intensification, indeed over­intensification of something which exists only in fragmentary form signified a solution of the world mystery! Such an optative holds good
despite the total lack of history in Spinoza, which alone would cause the fragmentary Almost­Not in the projected midday crystal to be comprehended and pursued in a
Not­Yet. The optative holds good despite the rationalistic dogmatism of the system, despite the pantheism which posits the denied God of heaven as the affirmed one
of nature and which, as Feuerbach rightly says, represents the negation of theology from the standpoint of theology. But Spinoza's substance in its radiant repose —
cum grano salis similar to Giotto's and Dante's repose in art — will appear as a corrective of Leibniz's goal of unrest and process. How remote, therefore, the thus
conceived notation and distinction of philosophical images of perfection is from relativism and especially from the subjectivist abjurations of truth which are called
pragmatism or fictionalism. But how remote,