THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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The craziest contradiction in the moral way of thinking would be caused by this very means, indeed the radical prevention of the categorical imperative by itself. But it
prevents itself according to Kant's so unambiguously judging testimony solely in a society whose rulers treat man ‘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’. It prevents itself no less in the purely
capitalist world that arose after Kant, in the world of deception which Hegel called the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’'. Thus the categorical imperative contains within it a
Humanum which is so little merely abstractly general and so clearly also anticipatorily general that it is not accommodated with its human landscape in any class society.
On the contrary, this axiom, with the unmistakable optative behind it, seems almost like an anticipatory formula directed towards a non­antagonistic society, that is, to a
classless one, in which real generality of moral legislation is possible for the very first time. Only here, with the individual maxim as an equally general principle, is that
transformation of ‘forces propres into social ones’ to be found, as prophesied by Marx; in accordance with a solidarity that has become possible in a total way. The
categorical imperative thus becomes, beneath stars which it calculated so to speak but could not yet see, the element of a formula for classless solidarity; its apparently
grey field is in fact full of distant enthusiasm.
The proposition of Anaximander or world which turns into likeness
No thinking without deprivation, but constant surprise at something takes it further. Surprise and astonishment not just at particularly abruptly emerging things, but also
at familiar things. It can thus become precisely conspicuous, apart from the How of a Being, that anything is at all. So the world is encountered as alien, and this alien
element itself gives the impetus to think further and further about it. That is why the so richly variable assertion by Empedocles cited above: that only like can understand
like, has not remained uncontradicted. At least not for the thinking of the question, of the transformation of the familiar into something conspicuous and by no means
self­evident; in fact this kind of thing is then already supposed to begin with grasping as perceiving. That is why Anaxagoras claimed the contrary to Empedocles: the
properties of objects were only graspable by means of the opposite element in us; like could therefore only be experienced and comprehended through unlike. This is
followed by