THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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too, the notation cited above is from the non­dialectics which already regards the ‘authentic’ element and essence of things or even simply the Totum as a static
completion — with the perspective only as an intending glance at or towards it and not also as an object tendency itself. The decision here runs: the optative, which
strikes with more or less consternation according to the philosophical approximations to this essential element, has to become a task in order increasingly to recognize
and increasingly to manifest the ‘authentic’ in the same feature. To put it another way: the essential element needs people for its ever more identical presentation; and
this most thorough theory­practice is the moral of the corrected wishful landscape in philosophy.
From this point of view nothing is more false than the unexamined proposition that something is too beautiful to be true. It must be examined, which is a duty and
without which certainly nothing can be affirmed about this beautiful thing from the start, but cannot be denied about it in this way either. Which means that more than
anywhere else the watchful concept belongs here with a value­substance, even the highest, with which That­Which­Truly­Is has been provided. This concept is by no
means the destructive one in terms of value, in the manner of a miserable and ultimately all the more subjectivist positivism, but it is more sharply than anywhere else (for
corruptio optimi pessima) the correcting one. That is why Aristotle described the scientific statement as a proposition which precisely in contrast to the wishful
proposition appears as true or false. Which only means of course that wishful propositions of a negative or positive kind, even if they refer to something objectively
possible, refer to something which has not or not totally occurred and does not or not totally exist, so that they are not or not fully affirmable or deniable with regard to
this. But rather all wishful propositions in so far as they can be treated scientifically move in the sphere of more or less great probability towards falsehood or truth; and
furthermore, this probability is determined according to the degree of more or less great objective possibility in the content of the wishful proposition. Possibility
therefore, that is, partial existence of conditions which is still by no means already sufficient for their realization, this constitutes the sphere in which nothing whatsoever
can be too beautiful not to be true in the future at least, according to the conditions. Indeed in which truth, precisely as one of essence, with the full and very old golden
sound of Being­In­Truth, possibly does not even have to beware of being edifying. Possibly of course, and this means in fact: after correction by detailed knowledge of
the really occurring process, of the objective­real possibility in which the whole process­reality is substantiated as one