THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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For each of these societies was based, though in different forms of association, on the master­servant relationship, on the use of people and their work for ends which
are by no means their own. Man as the only end: however general this humane element and especially the abstract notion ‘humanity in man’ may be in Kant, and
incidentally continued to be up to and including Feuerbach, exploitation is absolutely denied by it. Only morally denied, of course, Kant's practical reason lacks all real
practice because of the German misery, but it rings the judgment bell for exploitation from the standpoint of principle. And it does so both for the over­exploitation of
man and the predatory war which is inseparably connected with it: all this with projection from the standpoint of the moral principle, but also from the standpoint of a
future which is approaching it. The categorical imperative does not remain rigid either, any more than it remains or may ultimately remain confined to the idealistic realm
of the bourgeoisie. Illuminating in this respect is a real thunder and lightning proposition from the ‘Dispute of the Faculties’, 1798, a very late work in other words,
without mercy for bourgeoisie and feudalism together: ‘Since, for the omnipotence of nature or rather its supreme cause unattainable to us, man is only a trifle. But the
fact that the rulers of his own kind also take him for one and treat him as one, partly by burdening him like an animal, as the mere instrument of their purposes, and
partly by lining him up in their quarrels with one another in order —to have him slaughtered that is not a trifle but a reversal of the final purpose of creation
itself’ (Werke, Hartenstein, VII, p. 402f.). The final purpose of creation: with this concept Kant does not mean any empirical reality, but no theological sham reality
either; he means the Should­be of the moral law and its realization by the historical and above all future development of the human race. But here — and this founds
precisely the thundering ethics of the proposition cited above ­, but here a stratum is touched on which is most particularly charged with utopian pathos in Kant.
Whereby the mere idealization of an ideological kind (that of the realm of the bourgeoisie), as certainly as it exists at that time and place, is pervaded with a very
different signature. It is, logically speaking, the signature of value­concepts, in this case of a Should­be that by no means unconditionally surrenders to what is only once
given. And does not do so precisely because the value­concepts in question (and only those of a real value, hence progressive­humane ones, are concerned here) bear
the wishful, volitional and tendency contents of a rising class which has not yet attained full power and thereby at the same time imply, given sufficient thoroughness, the
radical content of the