THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the uncommonly fine remark with a good knowledge of disturbance: because of the opposite element in it every perception proceeds μετ λ
vacute
alphagrave
πης, i.e. connected ‘with reluctance’; also of course (from the same contrast) only the visible reveals the invisible (Diels, fr. 26a,). Certainly only the cold
perceives the hot, the bitter the sweet and vice versa, just as only the sick man notices, e contrario, what the health imperceptible to the healthy man is. In fact,
astonishment itself presupposes an inconsistent relationship to the world, though not one which has and seeks to remain inconsistent. To the world in which the Un­athome,
the unhomely element admittedly no longer predominates, as in the primitive, but has remained as a spur to questions, as a perceptibility of something not wholly
evident, not wholly crystalline in the world which now exists or has existed up to now. Thus Anaxagoras significantly supplemented the Empedoclean dictum of likeness
with the dictum of relative unlikeness between cognizing subject and object. And moreover with a momentous regard to what the world leaves to be desired, so to
speak, in the way of logical but also metaphysical evidence. After all, the logical crux has always been the individual and particular in relation to the general, the Many in
relation to the embracing One. Precisely the individual and particular, the factual Many of phenomena has always been a stumbling block for the epistemological
equation of thinking­Being and, as must be added, in a way which fruitfully disturbs idealism. This disturbance became totally apparent in late medieval nominalism,
when the factually individual and Many exploded the ‘universals’, in other words the generic concepts which appeared so homogeneous to logical thinking. The rift,
wholly irrevocable for idealism, between logical­general evidence and fact­based individual datum was then stated more precisely in Leibniz's distinction of ‘vérités
éternelles’ of a mathematical­moral­metaphysical kind and the ‘érités de fait’ underivable from them, i.e. the not logically obvious but empirically obtrusive truths of
experience. Only Hegel noted the dialectical unity in the contrasts of the individual and general which had become abstract, and Marx grasped them in material terms;
whereby everything effectively particular is that of something general and everything concretely general is that of something particular. But the other spur of the question
of unlikeness, that of the non­evidence of the many individual, above all that of world­being itself as a by no means panlogical, by no means crystalline­completed one,
this spur did not disappear even in materialistic terms and least of all in revolutionary­materialistic terms. There is after all, as was to be seen, precisely in revolutionary
ideals a Should­be with evidence (and by no means